Woo shows order Cancelled/Unpaid – Customer says order was paid?

Hi there,

Just to confirm, were you using the built-in PayPal Standard gateway that comes in the core WooCommerce plugin?

Also, from your description, it sounds like most orders work as expected, however there have been 4 or 5 cases where it didn’t work — is that correct? It usually works, and just some orders have this issue?

Are you able to reproduce the issue if you place a test order on the site yourself?

Most often, issues with payments going through to PayPal, but not being reported back to the WooCommerce site (to update the order status) are caused by issues with IPN. We have a guide for troubleshooting these issues here:
https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/paypal-standard/#section-24

Please go through the steps there to rule out different causes, and let us know how it goes.

If you are still having trouble, please also share a copy of your site’s System Status. You can find it via WooCommerce > Status. Select “Get system report” and then “Copy for support”. Once you’ve done that, you can paste it here in your reply. Please note that since this is a public forum, you may want to remove any sensitive information that you don’t want shared publicly.

Hello and thank you for your reply.

Yes, in the instances that the payment had been received, but I got an email from Woo saying that the payment had failed, it was with the Standard PayPal Gateway in the Core Woo Plugin.

Yes, 99% of the time, everything works fine, but just 4 or 5 times, I have had an experience as mentioned above. I will go through that guide about the IPN and report back.

I need to clarify something I just realized in regards to the most recent occasion, from last week. In this instance, the payment actually came through WooCommerce Payments Gateway – using the Stripe integration.

I just now found the “Payments” tab on the main WP menu, and was able to confirm the payment was received. They had also sent me a screenshot of the debit from their account which confirms this. But then, I look at the Woo Order system and it says order status Canceled – and when I look at the notes in the right panel of the specific order, it says “Unpaid order cancelled – time limit reached. Order status changed from Pending payment to Cancelled.”

So the strange thing, and error, is that this note of an unpaid order, is timestamped 1 hour after the timestamp in the Payments system saying that the payment was received.

Any more thoughts? Thanks!

One more thing, in reading the artical you posted about IPN debugging, it mentioned as a sidenote in the debugging process, about the “Hold stock (minutes)” option, and to disable it while debugging.

On this setting (WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Inventory), it also states “Hold stock (for unpaid orders) for x minutes. When this limit is reached, the pending order will be cancelled. Leave blank to disable.”

I realized that I had previously set this to just 5 minutes. Perhaps sometimes it takes a while longer, as in the last case where it looks like it took half an hour for the payment to come back as paid, and by that time, this part of Woo had marked the order as cancelled. So perhaps this was the issue? I just changed this to 120 minutes, perhaps this will solve the problem.

Any other ideas though, given my other message above? Thanks!

Hi there,

Thank you for checking those things and providing that additional information!

Yes, that low Hold Stock setting could certainly be what was causing this issue. Most of the time, WooCommerce Payments should give a response quicker than 5 minutes, and PayPal is usually quick but sometimes may take a bit longer. This could explain why it works the majority of the time, but just sometimes you see it fail — the 5 minute limit is hit and the order is Cancelled, but the gateway ends up still processing the payment.

Now that you have increased that limit, please let us know if you see any other cases of this issue. Thank you!

Hi there,

I hope you found the previous reply helpful. We haven’t heard back from you in a while, so I’m going to mark this as resolved – if you have any further questions, you can start a new thread.