v2.2.0 All PP payments stuck on pending payment

Hello @neotrope

Thank you for reaching out to us, we are here to help. Sorry to hear that our last update is causing this situation for you, but we would like to take a look at this.

You are the first report we get for this issue (besides the GitHub report you opened as well), so we have no data on this issue, but would expect this is caused by a plugin conflict. In order to start working on a solution, we need to be able to reproduce this issue. For that, we would need to ask you to create a staging site, update our plugin and perform conflict testing in order to find out what 3rd party plugin is causing this. Would that be possible for you?

A full conflict test is performed to rule out eventual issues with the theme or a different plugin. We recommend temporarily activating the default theme Storefront and disabling all other plugins except for?WooCommerce and?PayPal Payments to see if the behavior persists.

Here’s a guide that explains the steps in more detail: How to test for conflicts.

If you want us to help you out with this, you might need to share sensitive details with us, and for that, you could also open a private engagement with us via these instructions.

We really want to help you with this, but in order to do that, we first need to be able to reproduce the issue.

Pending your response.

Kind regards,
Joost

Hello @neotrope

Just to be sure, I want to share this information with you: yesterday, there was a PayPal outage that could possibly also affect this situation. Please see if this issue is still occurring, because this outage was resolved already. Incident Start:?Jul 18, 17:17 UTCIncident End:?Jul 18, 19:26 UTC

Pending your response.

Kind regards,
Joost

Thanks. It’s working today with 2.1.0, and I had checked the normal status page the other day (https://www.paypal-status.com/product/production) with nothing reported. I will wait a day and update to new version. Thanks! ?? (FYI > been managing wordpress since 2004 and webdev since 1995; but always willing to admit stoopid on my side)

Thanks for heads up on the PP outage, as that *has* happened couple times before over the years. SO, that is likely the culprit ??

Hello @neotrope

Since we did not hear back from you, I will assume this was caused by the PayPal outage and will mark this thread as resolved. If you are still encountering issues, please open a new thread and we will take another look.

Kind regards,
Joost

Thanks. Ironically, I’ve updated back to the new version and now folks have been using Stripe vs PayPal so going to presume all good. (Nobody has placed order with PP to verify working, in other words.) Thanks for follow up! ??

Hi, just follow up; still having this issue as of today. Old version works, new vesion does not. Unable to accept any PayPal orders. Any PP order is stuck on ‘payment pending’ even with existing clients logged in. PP ‘log’ in WooCommerce seems to show correct 200 and 201 responses.

Right now the only suspect plugin we installed recently due to a fake order flood from Phillapines, is the ‘WooCommerce Anti Fraud‘ plugin.

It has some ‘pre check PayPal’ settings. Not sure why it works with prior plugin, but not current PayPal plugin, but we are disabling that for the moment to see if this resolves the issue.

Hello @neotrope

Can you confirm this is the plugin you are using: https://woocommerce.com/products/woocommerce-anti-fraud/

If you are still encountering this issue, I would like to take a look at it and test on my testing environment. In that case, it would also be useful to know what settings you have used. You could always engage us privately if you want to share any details you would not like to share on a public forum.

Kind regards,
Joost

Hello; yes; that is the correct plugin and version. I had all the normal expected settings, nothing bizarro. I did have the “precheck” option for PayPal, which apparently sends a confirmation email to customer for ‘suspect’ orders. However, the orders having issues were past clients with a ‘0’ fraud score, so that should not have been a factor. I have it completely disabled now as we lost couple of projects due to the issue with PP. I have not had a chance to debug as I can’t place test orders and then cancel them as PP too smart for that ?? While I could do sandbox mode, not really useful when live site. So, for now, I just have the security plugin disabled, and zero issues since. I did have the capcha setting on for suspect orders, and set to put orders in pending if high suspect level.

Hello @neotrope

I did some tests with this plugin and found that when you activate some additional settings (default settings cause no problem), you get the error on the front-end: DateTime::__construct(): Failed to parse time string (24) at position 0 (2): Unexpected character. When I tried after this to pay

After this error I started to only get the error “You have reached maximum number of allowed orders in 24 hours. Please try again later.” until I deactivated the fraud plugin.

Then, when I turned off the plugin, the PP payments started to work again. The same situation occurred for the Advanced Card Processing payment method.

I would advise reaching out to the developer of this plugin to see if they are aware of this. Then if they say the issue is with us, please open a private engagement with us, and we can then check with our developers if there is anything we can do. However, this does look like an issue with the fraud plugin, that follows rules that automatically block our payment method after a specific amount of orders.

Kind regards,
Joost

Thanks. Anecdotally, the two plugins played nice prior to the latest PP plugin update. Initially I had ‘rolled back’ and it worked again. Then I did update along with other stuff, presuming it has been a PP outtage, even though I only saw ‘all good’ from the PP checkup system. Problem returned, so I disabled security plugin since it was the only “new kid in town” for us due to recent major hack attempts from Asia.

Ended up just blocking the country attacking us, since not a client locale. (They were trying to place 800+ fake orders!). Woo really needs a “velocity limit” as nobody would ever place 5+ orders in 10 minutes, let alone 500.

Anyway… I’m knee deep in trying to redo our whole service portal for compatibilty with PHP 8.1x at the moment, so no free brain cells for this at the moment. But I’m going to forward this to the plugin developer to take a look at, since obviously from your experience “it’s not just me.” ??

Hello @neotrope

That seems fair; sorry we can’t be of more help to you at the moment. If you think we need to make any changes or the developer of the fraud plugin needs our support, it might be best to open a private engagement with us. This way we can exchange details easier and are able to link the support request to the development ticket if needed.

Kind regards,
Joost

Thanks, makes total sense ?? Can’t believe it’s just me, but I’m also the annoying guy who walks into a bank and says hey your clock is broken. ??