10% of orders are failing

Hi @greencode,

We regret the trouble but are happy to clarify eventual concerns.
INSTRUMENT_DECLINED usually means the bank of the payer rejected the payment.
For example, when the user has a credit card linked to their PayPal account but there is no remaining balance on the credit card. PayPal wouldn’t know until attempting to capture the payment from the card. So when the buyer tries to pay with PayPal through their linked credit card and PayPal cannot charge the card because the bank rejected PayPal’s request, then this error will be logged.

The PayPal MTS can look into these transactions for you if you share with them the Debug ID of the failed request. But they will probably tell you something similar and it would usually be more up to the user to either reach out to their bank or to the PayPal customer support.
Anyway, when this error is logged, it’s usually neither the plugin nor PayPal that the payment was rejected.
The user also gets to try again two additional times with different PayPal funding sources before being thrown back to the checkout page.

Are there any other order failures you are experiencing or is it mostly the INSTRUMENT_DECLINED error?

In any case, the next update 1.7.0 improves the error messaging, logging & order notes to display more relevant errors that can be more easily understood.
We hope this will help to make eventual errors more clear. If you have any doubts, don’t hesitate to let us know.
Thanks!

Kind regards,
Niklas

Thanks Niklas. I’ll get in touch with PayPal MTS to clarify the errors. It’s always a tricky one as you can’t then keep going back to the customer and ask them to try different things.

Hi @greencode,

Payment-related back and forths with a buyer are rarely a great thing to have to do, especially when it’s not clear where exactly the problem is.

This particular error is one of the few ones where the fault most likely is within the buyer side of things though. So to get this resolved, some input from the buyer is likely required.
Maybe the additional insight from the MTS also leads to a different conclusion, but it’s the first best contact to reach out to.
If the MTS can’t provide any further meaningful details (they are usually tight-lipped about details, if confidential), then the user reaching out to PayPal customer support would be the next best thing, at least if they are under the impression that their bank did not reject any payments.

If there are any other failed orders that, for example, only say “Could not process order.” in the order notes with no further explanation, then there may also be something else going on. As mentioned before, following the next plugin version we hope to minimize orders with unclear failures.
But please let us know if there is anything not working as expected so we can provide the proper assistance to get it resolved.
Thank you!

Kind regards,
Niklas

We’re seeing the same thing, and I’ve not been able to replicate it. In another thread on here (WP Forums), it was recommended we stop using the Credit Card Processing add on, which we did. That seemed to have helped, however today we got another seemingly unexplained payment failure. The same customer bought one thing successfully, and then was unable to buy a second product after multiple attempts. Same generic error message :

“Could not process order. Order status changed from Pending payment to Failed.”

WHich doesn’t give you any of the “Why” that would be helpful to understand if this is related to the others or something different.

So am glad to hear that they’re improving the error messaging. I hope that comes out soon.

Since we haven’t heard back from you, I’m going to mark it as resolved.
In case you’re still having problems, feel free to open a new thread and let us know!