customers not receiving an order confirmation

Hi there! It sounds like the emails aren’t coming through, which can be caused by your server. By default, WordPress (and WooCommerce) uses phpmail() to send out emails, which can be problematic on shared hosts that may have a sending limit or restrictions on how emails are sent.

You can fix this by installing a plugin called WP Mail SMTP (for free): https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/

That allows you to set up an email on your host’s server and send through that (or even send through a Gmail account if you wanted).

Additionally, you could sign up for one of these services, some of which have a free tier. Each has a plugin you can use to connect to your site. After configuring there, mail will be sent out through their servers (but it will look like it’s coming from your domain), and you shouldn’t have this sort of problem anymore.

* https://sendgrid.com/ – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wp-sendgrid/
* https://www.mailgun.com/ – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/mailgun/
* https://mandrill.com/ – https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wpmandrill/

I hope this helps!

Thanks, Danny. Actually, I have Postman SMTP and WP Mail Logging… let me check on what they have to say in the logs…

So, I found that WP Mail Logging is showing that my customers are NOT ALWAYS receiving an email telling them that the order is confirmed. It is emailing me that I have an order, but the customer is not always receiving it. I wonder why this is happening? I have another plugin that I recently installed called Abandoned Carts, which has really helped me increase sales. I hope that there is no conflict:(

Hm, it’s odd that some customers are getting the messages. On the ones that aren’t, is there any trend you can identify? Maybe they all have Yahoo emails, or all purchased a Subscription product, or anything like that?

I’m not sure about the Abandoned Carts plugin – do you have a link to that? It could theoretically be causing problems (because really anything can), but if the errors started around when that was installed then disabling that might be a good idea and we can try to find a replacement.

There were two gmails, hotmails, yahoos and one client company email, so that can’t be the problem.

But I don’t think it’s only the confirmation email, it’s also not proceeding to the ‘order received’ page which I have set up as the Stripe end-point on the Stripe dashboard on stripe.com.

I had considered deactivating the Abandoned Carts plugin, but it generates so much business for me and is an under-appreciated tool for most websites. But I may have to after all…

https://www.tychesoftwares.com/store/premium-plugins/woocommerce-abandoned-cart-pro/

One last thing I am going to try before deactivating the amazing Abandoned Carts plugin is I will change the Stripe Woocommerce payment gateway setting from ‘Enable Stripe Checkout’ to unchecked. Part of the problem is that the customer simply does not know if the payment went through. The blue button on the Stripe Checkout (pop-up modal window) is supposed to turn green with a checkmark. I see that it does indeed do this for me when I pretend to be a customer on another user ID. I wonder if the Stripe Checkout modal is simply not working for all users?

@rocketrobin I will have our team check on this & get back to you today on this forum.

Yikes! Now people will think I’m advertising your plugin. How did you know I mentioned it on this forum? Are you spying on me:) Well, I guess it saves me time in trying to contact you about it. I’m not certain, but I do think the problem did begin at about the same time I installed your plugin. I haven’t deactivated it yet, but I did uncheck the Woocommerce setting for the Stripe Checkout modal window. Let’s see if that fixes the problem… I’ll let you know if I have another duplicate/triplicate or as in the last case 5-plicate order. Yes, I had to refund 4 identical orders that were EXTRA. A big hassle.

So, I was just looking through the error debugging log on the Stripe plugin which I enabled today before the latest round of multiple duplicate charges and here is what I found:

Basically, there were multiple successful tandem charges via Stripe, each a few minutes apart. I can’t copy and paste them here because they contain customer info, but it looks like the customer repeatedly submitted the info because they didn’t get any sort of confirmation that the order went through to completion. I have literally been told the same thing by customers calling in.

So, the question is: are they not seeing the green bar with checkmark? Or is there nothing happening on the front-end to alert the customer that the payment was successful? On the last payment submission, did the customer finally get some type of confirmation on the webpage where they finally were aware that the order was successfully submitted? If so, this would indicate some type of delay of more than a minute between order submission and confirmation.

A bit of a puzzle, I must say.

@rocketrobin, Not spying. ?? I have setup Notifications in my WordPress profile for certain words.

We would be happy to look at the issue via our forums & see if we can assist in any way. I will have my team check this though in a short time today & respond here.

Hi @rocketrobin,

This is Bhavik from the Tyche Softwares. I’m the lead developer for Abandoned Cart Pro for WooCommerce plugin.

I have tried to replicate your issue on our staging site, but I am unable to replicate the issue. I have the latest version of WooCommerce, Abandoned cart pro & WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway.

I have enabled the setting “Enable Stripe Checkout” from this plugin, and I am able to place the order from the checkout page. And also, I have a single entry for that order on my admin side. I have tried with 3-4 different orders.

Please feel free to get in touch with us via our forums if you continue to face problems.

It happened again: 4 identical orders received, I had to refund the last 3 of them manually. What a pain. So, it is not the problem with the Stripe checkout. I am totally perplexed on this…

With respect to the last order, I can confirm from both Postman SMTP and WP Email Logs, that the customer did not receive any email confirmation of their order and that helps to explain why they must have clicked 4 times on the Stripe Checkout.

I am now checking again the Woocommerce settings for email notifications…

Result: the Processing Order email is enabled. This is the email sent to the customer notifying them of order details after payment.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. ????? Is this a mail server issue? My site is on a dedicated IP with SSL… I pay big money to Bluehost for this.

Do you recommend I change the core email address for my website away from bluehost and on to gmail? I’ve been thinking of doing that for a while… this may push me over the edge…

I checked the Woocommerce Status Logs for Stripe and looked for errors (I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly), it just shows me, as far as I can tell, that there were 4 tandem charges, each a couple of minutes after the other. All successful. Again, suggesting that the customer somehow simply did not know if the order went through.

Does anybody know what is happening? Is there anybody out there with the same problem? Looks like I am going to have to deactivate the Abandoned Carts plugin, unfortunately…

Bhavik, can you try using the Lite version of your plugin? And let me know if you have any issues? Thanks.

“INTERNAL SERVER ERROR” at top left above the checkout form. According to recent customer, that is the problem. After hitting the “Place Order” button. It is an issue with the Stripe plugin.

php version is 5.6.31

Server environment
Server info: Apache
PHP version: 5.6.31
PHP post max size: 64 MB
PHP time limit: 30
PHP max input vars: 1000
cURL version: 7.24.0, OpenSSL/1.0.0
SUHOSIN installed: –
MySQL version: 5.6.32
Max upload size: 64 MB
Default timezone is UTC:
fsockopen/cURL:
SoapClient:
DOMDocument:
GZip:
Multibyte string:
Remote post:
Remote get: