Multiple Donations Stuck on “Pending”

The issue you are encountering usually happens when your payment gateway is unable to communicate your website via a webhook or IPN.

Here’s the order of how GiveWP works with the payment gateway to process the donation:

1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.
2. A donation (and subscription, if applicable) is created on the GiveWP side and set to “pending.”
3. All of the information is sent to the gateway to process the transaction.
4. The gateway processes it and notifies the site (via the webhook or IPN) that it went through.
5. GiveWP processes that webhook/IPN and sets the donation to complete.

You would need to find out why your payment gateway failed to communicate with GiveWP. To do that you would need to access the logs for each of your transactions from the dashboard of your payment gateway. Make sure to confirm whether or not the three transactions you referenced show up as having gone through. You’ll need to manually go through and mark the older ones as complete, using your payment gateway dashboard to cross-reference.

Also, you need to make sure that all the pages related to GiveWP are whitelisted from your cache systems (it depends on the service you are using: a plugin or server). Caching is handled differently on various sites and web hosts, and most of them allow for excluding specific URLs or parts of URLs from caching. At the very least, you should exclude the following slugs from caching:

/donations/
/donation-confirmation/
/donation-failed/
/donation-history/
/donor-dashboard/
/recurring-donations/ page (if applicable)
any page with a donation form on it

Also, the following query strings:
give-embed=donor-dashboard
giveDonationFormInIframe=1

Your web host can help with that. Some of them may require what’s called a “wildcard” like /donations/* to capture all subdirectories under the /donations/ folder.

While fine-tuning cache falls outside the scope of the support we’re able to provide, your success with online donations is our number one priority, and we’re happy to provide any tips.

Please let us know if you have further questions on this or need any additional assistance!

The problem is that this issue only seems to be occurring on select donors. Others are going through just fine (even just before or just after one that gets stuck).

I checked our PayPal account and none of the Pending ones (now abandoned because its been so long) have gone through to them. It’s like they never existed.

It is simply something wrong on the users ip address (meaning nothing we have control over) or is it something fixable?

It is most likely that the users with the pending donations, loaded a cached version of the page. This prevented the PayPal transaction from being initiated. Caching will cause some inconsistency in the way the GiveWP forms function. I would make sure that all GiveWP related pages are whitelisted from your cache systems. I would also ask the donors (who had the issue) to clear their browser cache or launch their browser in incognito mode. They can try making the donation again and let you know if they still encounter the same issue.

In the meantime, if you have confirmed the three payments never went through to PayPal, you can manually change the status of the donation from “Pending” to “Abandoned” (meaning the donor never finalized their donation). GiveWP usually changes the status to “Abandoned” automatically within 7 days if the donation is never finalized.

Please let us know if you have further questions on this or need any additional assistance!

Hi!

It’s been a while since we’ve heard back, and I know troubleshooting needs a little extra time. I’m marking this as resolved for now, but if you still have questions, you can send them along right here, and I’ll be happy to hop back in.

Have a great day!