PayPal stuck in "Authorization Pending" status...

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello All,

First note Logan's post above.

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.

Even with the above correct is seems a few are having an occasional issue, we need to figure out what the common theme is with these issues in order to solve it. Be SURE to include the date and time (in GMT) of the order as well, as I've been receiving Paypal notifications about live site issues.

Notification: Major Impact to PayPal APIs and Website - Nov 28 - Live Site

We are experiencing a system issue which may be affecting PayPal APIs and Website on the Live Site. We will send an update with additional details within the next 15-30 minutes. Sent Nov 28, 2:13 AM PST by BA

Resolved: Major Impact to PayPal APIs and Website - Nov 28 - Live Site

RESOLVED: This issue has been resolved as of Nov 28, 2:47 AM PST (Nov 28, 10:47 AM GMT). A history of updates can be found at the end of this notification or at our Live Site Status blog post. Sent Nov 28, 2:55 AM PST by BA

There were also issues on the 17th Start time: Nov 17, 4:41 AM PST (Nov 17, 12:41 PM GMT)
RESOLVED: This issue has been resolved as of Nov 17, 5:50 AM PST (Nov 17, 1:50 PM GMT).

The Internet is not a perfect thing, so if this is random (as it appears) it could be latency issues at anyone of a hundred of points along the way during peak periods of the day. We see it from time to time with UPS and other gateways not returning a rate.

[krittleb]

I'm relieved to see this is being looked into!

Just as helpful information, it does not appear to be random for us. Most of them are on international orders but there are some that are domestic. The last issue we had, she has ordered from us a large number of times and never had a problem. However, the last 3 payments have all done it, which is why she is especially livid with us. Again, when we look at her PayPal transaction, there is not any shipping address associated. It looks like it started happening several months ago as that is when her payments stopped coming through.

Hope that helps!

If you need me to supply her customer information so you can check her orders, please let me know and your contact information so I can give it to you.

[crazyjoe]

I can confirm the email address in my Gateway configuration is my "Primary" email address for my account in PayPal. I am using Able VERSION: 7.0.7.14588. Between yesterday and today I received Authorization Pending orders at the following times (ship to city): 12:08 AM (BLACKFOOT, ID), 6:27 PM (RICHMOND, TX), 12:38 PM (DILLSBURG, PA), and 9:19 AM (MEININGEN, GERMANY). Let me know if you need any other info from me. Lets get this figured out! Just to get through the holidays, can we get an updated "Order Status" configuration page that allows us to add "Authorization Pending" and "Unprocessed" to the list of status' that cause the "Order Status" to say "Problem".

[Shopping Cart Admin]

Hello All,

We need to confirm there isn't another source of page crash preventing the IPN from succeeding. For that we need the merchant log from the paypal interface. Please email me directly (mike@'ourdomain') your merchant log for the dates/times during which you're having trouble.

[crazyjoe]

I'm sorry I don't where to find

merchant log from the paypal interface

can you point me in the right direction to find where I can access those?

[Logan Rhodehamel]

If you log into your paypal merchant account, there should be a menu item labeled history. From that menu there should be an item titled IPN History. What would be ideal is if someone with the confirmed problem could go into the IPN History page and locate one of the known problem orders. I need to know if the IPN History reports a successful notification to AbleCommerce or if it indicates some kind of problem was encountered.

Here is a paypal page with general informatino about IPN history:
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd= ... Operations

[crazyjoe]

Thanks for clarifying Logan. None of my "Authorization Pending" transactions appear in my IPN History report. Please advise.

[crazyjoe]

I did find 1 of my Authorization Pending orders from last night in the PayPal IPN. Out of 6 Authorization Pending orders between yesterday and today, only 1 of them was in my IPN History report. I will email the IPN details to Mike.

[compunerdy]

I got one today (mine are always foreign customers).

Shows "Waiting for IPN (PENDING)" in the store but paypal shows it was paid.

I checked paypal IPN logs after spending 15 minutes trying to figure out how to see that page since I could not find the link under history..

At first glance everything looked fine. It showed as sent, etc. The when comparing it to other payments that did go through fine I saw this..

Order that went through fine had this URL "https://www.thecustomsabershop.com/ProcessPayPal.ashx"
This order that did not had this url "https://www.thecustomsabershop.com/Proc ... erId=30288"

Since this is the only difference I could find I think whatever is adding the OrderID to the end of these orders is causing it to not work correctly??

[crazyjoe]

None of my latest 7 Authorization Pending orders that came in over the weekend are in my IPN History list. Let me know if there is any other info I can provide.

[compunerdy]

crazyjoe.. They do not show in the IPN history but they do show as paid in paypal?

[crazyjoe]

No, they do not appear in PayPal at all. I searched by last name and email address.

[compunerdy]

I am not going to go back and read all this thread but there seems to be two different issues.

Issue 1 (like joe) Someone places a order and never gets to the paypal site. There is no record of the paypal payment at all on paypal.

Issue 2 (like me) Someone places a order and it says "payment pending" in the store, But shows as paid in PayPal.

[crazyjoe]

Just to be clear, my "Authorization Pending" orders also say "Payment Pending" they are not concidered "Problem" orders, as they should be.

[krittleb]

Yes, it does look like Joe's issue may be along a different thread. I believe that what is mainly being discussed here is that a customer checks-out, is directed to PayPal's web-site, makes the payment, the payment clears, and they think everything is good, but it is not being transmitted back to AC admin so seller does not ship order, customer gets mad, etc.

In Joe's case, if he cannot find the transaction at all in PayPal, then the customer never paid and apparently changed their mind on completing the purchase. We get some of those as well, but are only concerned about the ones that have actually paid and we are not made aware of it.

[crazyjoe]

I think we can all agree that one issue we are all having regarding this is that the orders with the status "Authorization Pending" should be "Problem" orders, but they are not, they are "Payment Pending" orders. Our system automatically prints picking tickets for all "Payment Pending" orders. There is no reason these orders should have the status "Payment Pending" and if we could get a fix for that, it would save a good amount of the hassle. Can anybody help us with adding "Authorization Pending" to the list of order status' that are considered "Problem" orders?

[compunerdy]

Has anyone from able looked into what I found out?

Joe.. I think every order would go to authorized pending in the checkout process so I am pretty sure that would cause issues. Maybe you should rethink your practice of printing them before they are marked paid and only print the paid ones which is what I and most other people probably do.

[crazyjoe]

Thanks for the pointers Tim, don't really understand your first sentence though.

Joe.. I think every order would go to authorized pending in the checkout process so I am pretty sure that would cause issues.

I don't understand how there could be a "Payment Status" that is not listed as a trigger option in the Configure --> Order Status page. If I could select "Payment Authorization Pending" to be another trigger for a "Problem" status, I could live with this whole issue. I know Mazhar and Logan have lots on their plate, but if one of you could help me out with adding that as an option I would be OH SO HAPPY!

Tim, your process of charging before picking would be a nightmare for my company. We have over 4,000 products in our warehouse and thousands of retail orders a day not to mention a wholesale division of my company. Our inventory quantities adjust exponentially every second and we can not charge an order before it is picked, as it is very possible we may be out of stock on an item. It would be a customer service nightmare to charge a persons card and then have to give them a refund if we are out of stock on a product. We have an automated system that brings orders into our Inventory program based solely on the fact that funds were appropriately "Authorized". Every one of my Authorization Pending orders DO NOT have funds properly Authorized and therefore they absolutely should not have a status of "Payment Pending". I understand some of your (Tim) "Authorization Pending" orders do have funds authorized, so you may not want to use the fix that I need.

[compunerdy]

What I meant (and I could be completely wrong) is that a customer during the normal checkout process would have the order flagged as "Payment Authorization Pending" between the point of selecting a payment method and actually paying (going to paypals site for instance). So what you are wanting to do would flag all of these as problem orders while the customer is still checking out.

Unlike you I fully charge before pulling a order so for me it is a mute point as I do not do anything with a order that has not been fully paid. Your explanation definately helped me understand why you need this to work as you are requesting. Does creating a new order status based off "Payment Authorization Failed" not work?

Currently my "payment pending" status has these triggers (I probably modified these from the standard but every order that is not paid goes here)

Order Placed
Payment Authorization Failed
Payment Capture Failed

So if I took the last two out and put that into "problem" status would that not do what you want or does that not work correctly?

[compunerdy]

double posting as I looked into this further..


CrazyJoe's issue.. There is no trigger for "Authorization Pending" so there is no way to separate these orders out of his authorized orders. (there may be someway to do this that is being overlooked)

Rest of us.. Orders marked as "Authorization Pending" are actually fully paid on paypals site but AC does not get updated with this info. For me this ONLY happens with international customers. I posted some info I found earlier and it would be nice if someone from Able would confirm they are looking into it since you asked us to gather this info.

[bgreenwald54]

I believe I have found where the problem of international orders stuck in pending status is rooted. When AbleCommerce sends the validation message back to PayPal, it is encoding the request in ASCII:

Code: Select all

public bool ValidateNotification(string formValues)
{
   ...
    using (StreamWriter streamWriter = new StreamWriter(length.GetRequestStream(), Encoding.ASCII))
    {
        streamWriter.Write(str);
        streamWriter.Close();
    }
    using (StreamReader streamReader = new StreamReader(length.GetResponse().GetResponseStream()))
    {
        end = streamReader.ReadToEnd();
        streamReader.Close();
    }
    return end.Equals("VERIFIED");
}

However, many international names have accented letters in them that are unsupported in the ASCII character set. 99.5 percent of all of our PayPal IPN issues come from users with accented letters in their first or last names. These fields happen to be included in the verification process with PayPal. So when AC sends an ASCII-encoded request to verify an IPN, the encoding mangles the accented characters, and PayPal must be sending an "INVALID" response. Unfortunately, AC does nothing to log this "INVALID" response. Instead, the code redirects the request to the ~/Members/MyOrder.aspx page.

PayPal says the following on their verification process help page: (https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd= ... IPNTesting)

If you receive an INVALID message

o Check that your are posting your response to the correct URL, which is https://www.sandbox.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr or https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr, depending on whether you are testing in the Sandbox or you are live, respectively.

o Verify that your response contains exactly the same IPN variables and values in the same order, preceded with cmd=_notify-validate.

o Ensure that you are encoding your response string and are using the same character encoding as the original message.

PayPal lets the user decide how an IPN message will be encoded when it is sent to their system. Unfortunately, AC does not detect what the sending encoding is when it formats the verification back to PayPal. At the very least, these verification messages should be UTF8-encoded. Making this change from ASCII to UTF8 encoding on the IPN verification would probably eliminate the majority of these issues.

We verified that we were receiving the IPN messages by writing our own ashx handler page to catch them first and log them to the database, and then pass the requests on to the AC PayPal IPN Processing.

Hopefully an AC representative can verify what I have researched and provide a plan of action to resolve this issue.

Thanks,
Brian

[compunerdy]

Hopefully you are correct and they fix it. I thought I found a clue and mentioned it here as well as sent a E-mail to Mike but got no response at all..

[Crazziee]

I have been getting these errors as well, And it seems from my testing the Authorization pending only happens if the user clicks on the button on the PayPal screen to redirect back to the store, If they let it run its course (5/10 secs) it seems to always work.

Does anyone know how to adjust this timeout? I have checked PayPals website but there's no mention of changing the timeout value. I would actually like to remove the button.

[compunerdy]

Still getting these, always with foreign orders. Is someone going to fix this? What could be more import to fix than a payment issue? This is not a new bug, it has been around for years now.

[bgreenwald54]

Still getting these, always with foreign orders. Is someone going to fix this? What could be more import to fix than a payment issue? This is not a new bug, it has been around for years now.

Can you look at the first and last names on the orders that fall into this status and tell me if you are seeing the same thing that I am seeing. Basically, if the names contain any characters that are non-ascii, the IPN is not processed properly due to the verify message back to PayPal being improperly encoded in ASCII.