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Chronic issue with stuck payments

Gravity Support Forums » Plugin Support » Gravity Forms PayPal Add-On

  1. rcalhoun
    Member

    Hi,

    We're having an issue with stuck paypal payments on this page, among others:
    http://www.tep.org/nplc

    On the WordPress side, the transation is marked as "Processing...". I saw the thread below on this issue:
    http://www.gravityhelp.com/forums/topic/manually-approving-stuck-paypal-payments

    and it does not seem to cover what I am seeing. Looking at the IPN history in PayPal, 100% of transactions say "sent", and (for example) the most recent transaction listed on the Gravity Forms entities page isn't listed by PayPal at all. So it is like PayPal never got the message.

    This suggests that my site is timing out waiting for PayPal. (PayPal's web site is certainly slow thse days.) Regardless of which side the fault is on, is there some way to alter the timeouts so that both sides are more patient? We are getting a "stuck payment" rate something like 40%, which is pretty lousy.

    Thanks,

    Rob

    Posted 12 years ago on Friday August 12, 2011 | Permalink

  2. rcalhoun
    Member

    I would like to get a better understanding of this problem before doing my next payment form. The issue is that some entries are stuck on "Processing..." in GravityForms. PayPal has no knowledge of these IPN transactions. Based on some testing, I believe that users are submitting the form, being transferred to PayPal, and then canceling the transaction (or simply closing the page) at the PayPal level.

    I have verified that clicking the "Cancel and return to [website]" link in PayPal results in an entry that is stuck on "Processing" in GravityForms.

    Is there some way to configure GravityForms so that these transactions are marked as "Cancelled" rather than stuck at "Processing"?

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday August 31, 2011 | Permalink

  3. rcalhoun
    Member

    One thing I have determined: the "Cancel URL" in the PayPal setup must be an absolute URL ("http://example.com/transaction-cancelled", not "./transaction-cancelled") because the cancel navigation is started from within PayPal's site. So I am now correctly navigating back to my own web site on cancel.

    However, the entry in GravityForms is still stuck at "Processing". What do I need to do to make GravityForms catch the "cancel" message from PayPal?

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday August 31, 2011 | Permalink

  4. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    If Gravity Forms Entries are marked as Processing but you have received payment for them on PayPal and the IPN History says the IPN request is SENT... then this is a server problem. Your server isn't allowing the IPN request to be processed.

    If you send us a WordPress admin login, and an FTP login for your site we'd be glad to take a look. Ultimately this issue is going to be server related. You can send this information to me directly at carl@rocketgenius.com and reference this forum post so I know what it is about.

    As for the cancel issue... Gravity Forms doesn't know when a user has clicked on the Cancel link on PayPal. PayPal doesn't communicate this back to us. So we can't reflect this in the entries.

    Posted 12 years ago on Wednesday August 31, 2011 | Permalink

  5. rcalhoun
    Member

    > As for the cancel issue... Gravity Forms doesn't know when a user has clicked on the Cancel link on PayPal. PayPal doesn't communicate this back to us. So we can't reflect this in the entries

    If they use clicks "cancel", PayPal fires whatever URL you want. From the IPN docs:

    cancel_url The URL to which the sender’s browser is redirected if the sender cancels the approval for a payment on paypal.com. Use the pay key to identify the
    payment as follows: payKey=${payKey}.

    Gravity Forms even supports the cancel_url; it just isn't using it. (I understand that not much can be done if the user just closes their browser window, but it should be possible to handle the cancel more cleanly.)

    I haven't found any issues where PayPal took the money and GravityForms is stuck, but I have a high rate of what I suspect are "cancelled" transactions.

    Posted 12 years ago on Thursday September 1, 2011 | Permalink

  6. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    Gravity Forms currently only supports the cancel_url so much that it lets you pass a custom one. It isn't using the payKey option in the API. But that is an excellent idea and we can look at what needs to be done to add it to the PayPal Add-On.

    Posted 12 years ago on Friday September 2, 2011 | Permalink

This topic has been resolved and has been closed to new replies.