Hello @rrruq
With PayPal Standard, when a customer clicks the “Proceed to PayPal” button, WooCommerce creates an order in your database before the customer is redirected to PayPal to make the payment. This is why if a customer cancels the payment on the PayPal page, the order still exists in WooCommerce with a status of “Cancelled.”
However, with the PayPal Payments plugin, the process works a little differently. Here, the order in WooCommerce is not created when the customer clicks the initial PayPal button. Instead, the order is only generated after the customer has completed the payment approval in the PayPal popup window. Therefore, if a customer cancels the payment at the PayPal checkout stage, no order is created in WooCommerce, which is why you do not see it in your dashboard.
To have the WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin behave similarly to PayPal Standard in terms of order creation, you would need to disable the smart buttons feature. Disabling this feature will make the plugin create an order in WooCommerce as soon as the PayPal button is clicked, not after the payment is completed. However, please note that this change will also disable all advanced features of the plugin that are dependent on the smart buttons.
If you decide this change is necessary for your store, you can disable the smart buttons by following the instructions on this page: Disable Checkout Smart Buttons.
I hope this clears up the confusion. If you have any more questions or need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to contact us.
Kind Regards,
Krystian