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PayPal IPN works for "Approved" orders but not "Canceled" orders

  1. contractors
    Member

    I have successfully setup my Gravity Forms test WP website to work with PayPal sandbox using IPN, and PayPal correctly transfers control back to either my "success" or "canceled" URLs correctly.

    Also, any subsequent display of my GF "Entries" listing correctly lists all the processed forms entries - both processed and canceled orders. However, although the detail of those processed orders shows that successful orders are correctly displaying an IPN "Payment Status" of "Approved", any orders that were canceled within PayPal (i.e., when the user clicks on SUBMIT on my form and is transferred to PayPal, and then they subsequently cancel the order from within PayPal) continue to show an IPN "Payment Status" of "Processing".

    I would think that any order thus canceled would send an IPN code back to Gravity Form that it was canceled.

    One other hitch: on my order form there are some order-able items that are $0.00 cost, and 99 percent of the time my users will be ordering non-zero items and simply adding these freebies to their order, but as things now stand they can create an order that only has zero-cost items.

    I understand from other posts on this forum that a possible future GF feature will be to require a min amount to be passed to PayPal (which would be good for me) but in the interim my order form can pass zero-total orders to PayPal. Fortunately, though, PayPal recognizes that the order total is zero and then immediately transfers control back to my "success" URL, and a subsequent GF "Entries" list will include such orders in the listing. The one drawback is that these zero-amount orders also show up with a "Payment Status" of "Processing" (whereas in actuality they are equivalent to being "Approved" since their amount total was zero and since PayPal directed the user in those instances back to the "success" URL).

    Note that these zero-amount orders - although they are apparently processed successfully by PayPal since it directs the user back to my "success" URL - do not show up in the PayPal account audit trail of processed orders (which I can sorta go along with since the order did not require any funds to complete).

    To summarize my questions:

    1) Should not Gravity Forms' "Entries" listing show a value of "Canceled" (rather than "Processing") for those orders that were canceled by the user within PayPal, and

    2) Should not Gravity Forms' "Entries" listing show a value of "Approved" (or at least something other than "Processing") for those orders whose grand total amount was zero and, apparently, processed successfully by PayPal?

    Posted 13 years ago on Wednesday April 27, 2011 | Permalink
  2. 1) The IPN only communicates actual order information when an order is placed, when the user hits "Cancel" there is no order to communicate information about at that point, it's temporary and doesn't actually exist yet. So IPN doesn't communicate that the user has pressed the "Cancel" button. Gravity Forms then doesn't know this has taken place because it relies on IPN for order information updates.

    2) Order forms that have a Total of $0 are not passed to PayPal. They go right to the standard Thank You message. PayPal doesn't process orders that have a $0 value so PayPal isn't involved at that point and Gravity Forms doesn't pass the user to PayPal in that situation. PayPal requires a valid price and $0 is not a valid price with them.

    The payment status is directly tied to PayPal IPN communication updates. We can look into ways to better handle this in a future release but we are going to have to get creative in how we do so because PayPal doesn't provide any solutions for us to leverage to implement solutions to these two issues.

    Posted 13 years ago on Wednesday April 27, 2011 | Permalink
  3. contractors
    Member

    Thanks for the detailed response.

    At least for my current app I can work well within those boundaries now that I am aware of them. And, at least for my current app, I like having the ability to order only freebies yet still having a GF Entries entry created for such zero-amount orders (it's better than no entry being created).

    And as I mentioned earlier I hope that for future flexibility GF gets the ability to place a MIN/MAX total amount on all PayPal orders.

    Posted 13 years ago on Thursday April 28, 2011 | Permalink