Payments go through but: “Sorry, trouble retrieving payment receipt.”

Hey @retrocool

Can you please provide a bit more details from your testing steps please ?
What gateway are you using, do you have Enable guest checkout enabled, are you using the buy now functionality instead of the regular add to cart > checkout flow ?

As for the emails issue try reviewing this article: https://docs.easydigitaldownloads.com/article/189-email-receipts-are-not-being-sent
You can start by installing the Email Log plugin and retest and see if any emails are logged in the plugin’s page and what status is it showing for the emails.

Thanks for your response.
The gateway is PayPal Standard, to a business paypal account. I have set this up with JUST the PayPal email address, no tokens or API Credentials.
But note EDD correctly marked the sale as ‘Completed’
The platform is: latest versions of everything, and only Elementor+Pro installed as extra plug-ins.
Testing steps were: go to the site and buy the thing. See if it worked.
I have not changed ‘guest checkout’ from the default (where is that set?), and I was logged in as admin when I tested it.

Once I installed “email log” (the only thing I changed!), the email from pressing the ‘resend’ link is now being sent correctly. So we’re only concerned about the error message: “Sorry, trouble retrieving payment receipt.”, now.

Do you have any caching plugins installed ? Sometimes a caching plugin will serve the cached version of the purchase receipt page instead of showing the correct version.

If you do try excluding that page from being cached. If you don’t run any specific cache plugins try reaching out to your hosting provider too as they might have caching in place at the server level.

I can confirm that there is no caching going on at all. It’s a VPN so basically I’m the hosting provider.

I did another test and it all worked, this time I wasn’t logged in when I made the purchase.. I wonder if it had something to do with that?

Try setting up a staging site and give it some more testing both as logged in and logged out and see if you can replicate the issue all the time.
It should not matter if its logged in or not. The cart “session” data is stored in the users browser and when they return from the gateway if the session still exists then the purchase receipt will show the require information.

If the customer somehow starts the purchase in Chrome and fnishes it in Firefox for example then the cart session data does not exist as it was not created in the browser they are using now so in this scenario its a high chance for the “Sorry, trouble retrieving payment receipt.” message to show.

Good day! I faced the same problem, but in my case these are links to download pdf books (
The test payment (classified as free) is going well. If a book without a price also gives out links to download, but when you need to pay .. goes to billing> the payment is removed> returns back to the cart, then I see the same message “Sorry, trouble retrieving payment receipt.”
The money has been withdrawn, links are duplicated to the mail .. but nothing happens on the site.
I added the Fondy payment gateway, there was no suitable one in your list of payment systems.