PayPal stuck in "Authorization Pending" status...

[jmestep]

Mazhar, I have a question on this:

2- Set Auto Return to on

Weren't we told in the past to turn AutoReturn to off?
Was this changed at any time, like 704 SR2?
We have a client having trouble.

[mazhar]

Nice question Judy, I looked into this and seems like we made some fixtures to this as a part of future work and merged them back to 7.0.4. These changes are not available publicly but worked for me because I was testing it on our 7.0.4 dev setup. These changes are not available in 704 SR2. See http://bugs.ablecommerce.com/show_bug.cgi?id=8639

[GrfxDan]

So should I have Auto Return set to OFF for my 7.0.3 store?

[crazyjoe]

Mazhar it seems like the "Payment Data Transfer" was supposed to be set to OFF before as well. Were you able to troubleshoot this any further after seeing that I am getting ProcessPayPal.ashx in my Trace viewer as both a 302 GET and 500 POST? I took another look at my Trace details for my ProcessPayPal.ashx 302 GET and it does have my transaction details. I hope this helps.

[Logan Rhodehamel]

It seems this is a winding trail. I will sort out what is the current public release and whether we have something that is waiting to be published.

[crazyjoe]

Any update on this? We had made a lot of headway, I'm hoping we can get this sorted out soon. Thanks!

[Logan Rhodehamel]

Everyone who is having a problem with payments stuck in pending status - please double check your PayPal account configuration inside of AbleCommerce. There is an account name that you must enter - the paypal email address. Make sure this email address is the *primary* email address for your paypal account. The only identified cause of this problem so far is that the email address entered within AC does not match the primary paypal account address. PayPal tells us during the IPN who the payment was made to and it is identified by the primary account address. We check this against the configured value to ensure they are a match - it is part of a number of fraud checks that PayPal recommends to validate an IPN request as valid.

So if the values mismatch, we ignore the IPN.

[GrfxDan]

I'll double check this on my setup but if this were the culprit then ALL payments made via PayPal would experience the same problem, no? This doesn't explain why only SOME of the PayPal payments aren't reflecting the correct status.

[GrfxDan]

In my case the email address entered in AbleCommerce was indeed a secondary email address on my PayPal account. I've changed it to the primary address and will let you know if I continue to get PayPal orders with incorrect statuses. Let's hope this fixes the problem.

[Logan Rhodehamel]

I'll double check this on my setup but if this were the culprit then ALL payments made via PayPal would experience the same problem, no? This doesn't explain why only SOME of the PayPal payments aren't reflecting the correct status.

No... only IPN would be impacted by this problem. It's a fraud check specific to IPN. Sorry, in all our attempts to reproduce the problem we never considered this configuration issue. Thanks to Joe Payne for providing us the trace output that pointed us directly to it. Going forward I'll be lodging some project requests to improve the processing script and make errors more obvious.

[crazyjoe]

Yep that's the ticket!!!!! DING DING DING! I am no longer stuck in Authorization Pending. I am back to just regular Authorized. I am getting sent to an error page when I automatically get sent back to my site from PayPal. Can I shut auto-return off so this doesn't happen? I get an Object reference not set to an instance of an object error.

[crazyjoe]

I turned my Auto Return off, made the return URL blank, and turned Payment Notifications off and it still works. Now customers don't get sent to an error page and if they click return to my site they get sent correctly to their order receipt. I am so excited. Thanks for everyone hard work. And please make it clear so people know, even though you log into PayPal with the same email every time its the email address that PayPal notifies that is the one that needs to be in the Able admin. Thanks again Logan!

[GrfxDan]

Yep that's the ticket!!!!! DING DING DING! I am no longer stuck in Authorization Pending.

Horray! I'm very glad to hear this.

[crazyjoe]

I am still getting an error in my error log every time someone uses PayPal through my OnePageCheckout. The order goes through fine, the status is "Authorized" as it should be, but my error logs say... An error has occured at http://www.hotleathers.com/ProcessPayPal.ashx Object reference not set to an instance of an object. Any idea how I can go about troubleshooting what is causing this? Not a big deal, but just trying to get everything all clear.

[GrfxDan]

Um, sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I just got another order that's stuck in "Authorization Pending" even with the correct (Primary) PayPal email address entered. What else could be causing this?

[GrfxDan]

btw, this is the first case of this that I've had since I corrected the email address back on August 9th. Prior to correcting the address I'd receive one of them about every other day. The primary email address appears to have fixed most of the problem but not all of it...

[crazyjoe]

I still get Authorization Pending orders every so often but it's always because the customer hasn't completed their order. Remember Able still hasn't fixed the most ridiculous of all PayPal issues; the old "Click the Pay Now with PayPal button on the order receipt issue. There is no conceivable reason why the PayPal payment method should bring you to your order receipt rather then directly to PayPal. Once this is fixed, it will probably fix our Authorization Pending issues completely. Mazhar and Logan do you know if this is going to be fixed any time soon? Also, I'd just like to say, I get the error "An error has occured at http://www.hotleathers.com/ProcessPayPal.ashx" in my error logs ever time a person checks out using my PayPal payment method now that I've fixed the issues causing it to get stuck in Authorization Pending. I'd love it if someone can tell me how ot troubleshoot this error.

[GrfxDan]

This was not a case of the buyer not clicking the "Pay Now" button. Payment was received and cleared instantly but the order status was stuck at "Authorization Pending". It has only happened once since I updated my email address. That's MUCH better than before but the issue is still not 100% resolved.

[ebachour]

Hi, Im using VERSION: 7.0.6.14312 and I have a lot of orden from Paypal with authorization pending (Waiting for IPN (PENDING) ) status , but in Paypal their status is completed, please help.

[crazyjoe]

Has anybody ever gotten a fix for this? I recently upgraded to 7.0.7 hoping this would be the answer, but to my dismay, every day this past weekend gave me at least 1 Authorization Pending order (happens to 1 out of every 10 paypal orders for me). I thought this might be caused by PayPal taking a too long to respond to Able. Maybe there is a way to give it more time? Let me know because I was really expecting this to be fixed in 7.0.7 or at least maybe now there is an easier way for me to deal with this, rather then logging into PayPal and capturing funds for these orders manually.

[compunerdy]

I still get these but only for certain foreign orders.

[Crazziee]

Yeah I am getting these Daily as well, It's mostly from European orders. (Germany to be exact)


If anyone comes up with a fix then please post it here. It's driving me crazy!!

[crazyjoe]

These are getting very annoying as we have hit the holiday season. Lets get this moved into the "BUG" category for this reason: When an order has a "Payment Status" of "Authorization Pending" the order's "STATUS" needs to be "PROBLEM" because this is an order that cannot be captured. At least if we see "Problem" we won't pick, box, and prepare to ship the orders. This is happening to me a lot more now that I have the holiday order rush coming in and my shipping department picks all orders that are "Payment Pending" This is not a Europe only problem for me by any means. Let me know if anyone knows a way to make these say "Problem" and lets get this issue escalated to a BUG so we are not constantly inundated with it.

[crazyjoe]

Oh, and I also have PayPal orders that come in with the "Payment Status" of "UNPROCESSED" these also still say "Payment Pending" These orders do not have a payment pending, if anything they have a phone call pending, because we have to contact the customer to update their payment. Please include this in the bug as well. "UNPROCESSED" is not a status option I can choose to add to the "PROBLEM" status' in my Order Status configuration and neither is "AUTHORIZATION PENDING".

[krittleb]

Glad I found this post and our issue appears to be more universal than I thought. As others above, ALMOST all of our PayPal payments come through just fine and all statuses update correctly, the shipment proceeds, and customers are happy. HOWEVER, we have started having around one payment a week that is completed in PayPal and the status is not pushed back to our site. The order information from AC shows in the PayPal admin, so it is obvious that everything is transmitting TO PayPal, just not back. We do not use PayPal Express, only the Pay Now PayPal button located on our check-out page. Our settings are correct, we have the correct primary e-mail address specified.

Note that we did not ever have this problem (started using AC almost 4 years ago) until a couple months ago. It sounds like PayPal maybe changed some requirements/processes around that time??

Another thing to note, we have not checked it before on previous occurrences, but since reading this thread, we checked the ones from this week, and there is NOT a shipping address provided in PayPal. So, it looks like AC is not sending the shipping address and/or they do not have one on file with their PayPal account.

Please advise ASAP as we absolutely cannot spend the time to check dozens of "Authorization Pending" orders against our PayPal account ever day to see if any are actually paid. Also, customers do not always use the same e-mail address on our site that is associated with their PayPal accounts, so even if we manually check all the e-mail addresses in PayPal for the "Authorization Pending" orders, it still won't catch them if they use a different e-mail.

This is frustrating beyond belief and our customer service agents are about beyond themselves as we are getting inundated with VERY unhappy, formerly loyal customers. Many are demanding refunds and taking their business elsewhere. We rely on return customers and flawless customer service and order experience to accomplish this and it has been our one major ongoing disaster.

This is beyond "bug" status, it is an emergency situation for us.