How to set Klarna orders with failed payments to “failed”?

Hello @louisekrokedil ,

Thank you very much for keeping your word and publishing the long-awaited update at the beginning of the year.

Regarding the error rate for orders with Klarna: To be honest, I don’t think the problem is just ours either.

@janez33 also wrote, see above, that almost 20% of their Klarna orders don’t go through. So the problem with the inexplicable cancellations doesn’t just seem to affect us.

Klarna was by far our biggest problem with payment service providers in 2024 and we want to see an improvement now before we invest any more time.

We will therefore first check to what extent the new update runs smoothly and supports our automatic processes. Then we can still take care of the error rate.

Hi @robertrosanke ,

Please get back to us if you are having issues with the latest update of the plugin and the failed order status functionality. And if you would like us to take look at any specific order where the customer reported issues with the checkout process please let me know.

Hi,

The code changes that were discussed in this thread and recently released were based on a workflow that is no longer applicable for this purpose. As a result, our changes did not deliver the expected outcomes for either you or us.

The solution currently implemented in the plugin is the one described here, which works effectively when inventory is managed by WooCommerce. Since adhering to WooCommerce standards is the primary goal of our plugin, we will not be making any changes to this functionality:
<a href=”https://docs.krokedil.com/krokedil-general-support-info/pending-payment-orders-and-held-stock/ “>https://docs.krokedil.com/krokedil-general-support-info/pending-payment-orders-and-held-stock/

That said, we do recognize shops may have different requirements and we strive to support as broad of a range of options to meet those requirements where possible, appropriate, and reasonable. To help improve this issue, we will introduce a new action that triggers whenever the modal is closed, regardless of the reason. This will enable developers to write custom code tailored to each specific store’s needs. Once the new action is implemented and documented, we will share the links here for your reference.

Additionally, you could create a cron job to set unpaid orders to failed after a specified timeframe from the order’s creation.

Appreciate the complexity and importance of this topic, and hope this comment and additional updates will help improve handling of Klarna pending orders in your shop.

Hi @louisekrokedil .

I’m not sure whether I understood the rather diplomatically written message correctly.

What I did understand:

• you no longer want to set the order status to “failed” yourself in future and reverse the newly introduced change
• you also want to reintroduce the old, very unsatisfactory behavior or stick to it
• If store operators want to make their processes efficient, they should develop a solution – each for themselves

Did I understand that correctly?

Hi @robertrosanke ,

We want to make the plugin as good as it can be for this flow, but the reason we cannot impact this as we hoped is that Klarna does not share the necessary data with integrations to know when to set the Woo pending payment to failed. The recent change was not reversed, but it didn’t impact the issue as we had anticipated.

A cron job should hopefully address the issue, but a cron job is a shop specific configuration. Could a cron job resolve the problem for your shop?

Hello @klarna ,

thanks for the update.

A cronjob could probably help us, yes.
But I don’t understand why every store owner who wants to use Klarna via your plugin has to program it manually.

An out of the box solution should be much more efficient and valuable for your customers.

For example, you could add a function in the plugin settings: Automatically set orders to “failed” after x hours. Anyone who activates this option already knows why they are doing so, and that’s the end of the matter.
You could also create an entry in the order notes that informs the shop operator that the order has automatically been set to failed because Klarna has not given the green light for x hours.

That’s the end of the matter, without adding manual effort for every store operator.

@louisekrokedil :

To be honest, I was confused about the link you showed (https://docs.krokedil.com/krokedil-general-support-info/pending-payment-orders-and-held-stock/).

I don’t like what the “Changed pending payment orders” section says about creating multiple orders for just one customer.

Earlier in this thread I described how PayPal, for example, simply sends the user back to the checkout if you cancel in the PayPal popup and there are not multiple orders in the system for this one customer.
Especially if you want to automate processes, in this case e.g. the payment reminder in case of problems, it worries me that a customer with one checkout process may have two orders in the WooComerce system.

The “second order” may go through as paid, while the “first”, pending order is then set to failed by the cronjob and the customer receives a message that the payment has failed and they should pay again.

I can hardly tell my customer, for whom I’m writing this thread, about this behavior without him thinking I’m joking.

It’s not meant to be malicious. It’s more like honest feedback so that we can initiate improvements together.

I also have customers who wouldn’t care about the behavior because they only have a few orders and process them manually.

However, anyone who relies on reliable automation is probably not satisfied with the current situation. It seems immature compared to other payment solutions for WooCommerce (PayPal, Stripe).

I can just add that I completely agree with @robertrosanke , very well written and very logical to me also.

@louisekrokedil You have to think bigger picture. we have Klarna on almost more than 100 WordPress installations, we can’t just log in to every site and make some Klarna changes or enable this and that. We are using custom code development and WP CLI for making plugin settings changes for multiple sites and I can tell that Klarna has most of the problems with status staying forever in Pending payment. You should implement a system where you can detect those problems with pending orders on your own and without users reporting those problems because not everybody has this amount of orders as we do.

@robertrosanke I think you have a very good understanding of different payment systems in woocommerce and it is more incredible that I found a person that agrees how Klarna should be handling pending payment orders and has problems that too many orders are pending is even more incredible. Maybe we can help each other out with similar problems with checkouts.

I’m working for Europe’s fastest-growing ecommerce,with daily orders over 30,000 in 22 countries so hit me up on X if you think we can help each other out or share ideas , solutions:) https://x.com/janez_kolar

Hello,

Apologies for the late response here and thank you again for the feedback. We will take this feedback with us at Klarna to see if something can be implemented in the future as today (as previously stated), as Klarna does not share data with integrations to know when to set the Woo pending payment to failed. If such data would be returned by Klarna in the future we will of course update our Woo plugin in line with this.

If we were to introduce a setting that changes the status to failed after a set number of hours as suggested this would conflict with the existing solution detailed here used by thousands of merchants and in line with WooCommerce standards.