Duplicate Stripe Orders / Payment Processing Issue

Hi there!

Thank you for reaching out and sharing these details. We understand your concern regarding the duplicate Stripe orders, duplicate charges, timeout errors during checkout, and orders being marked as cancelled despite successful payments.

To help us investigate this further, could you please let us know if any changes were made to the site before the issue started appearing?

Additionally, could you please share screenshots of the affected order notes?

You can find the order notes by navigating to:

WooCommerce → Orders → Edit affected order

On the order details page, in the right sidebar, you should see the Order Notes section.

Could you also please check whether there are any Stripe-related error logs around the time the affected orders were placed?

You can check this via:

WooCommerce → Status → Logs

Then select any Stripe-related log file from the dropdown and look for entries matching the affected order timestamps.

Also, I’d like to understand your site properly. Please share with us the necessary information below for us to investigate the issue further:

• System Status Report which you can find via WooCommerce > Status

Please use https://pastebin.com/ or https://gist.github.com/ and share a link to that paste in reply here. Once we have more information, we’ll be able to assist you further.

Hi @problematichild,

Thank you for sharing the screenshots and the detailed System Status Report, this gives a much clearer picture of what is happening on the site.

From the order notes and your findings, it does appear that the duplicate orders are not being generated by Stripe retrying the same Payment Intent. Instead, separate successful Payment Intents are being created, which usually indicates the checkout request itself is being submitted more than once.

The screenshots also align with what you described earlier, where the customer likely experiences a delay or interruption during checkout, then retries the payment before the first request fully completes.

A few things stand out from the report that could contribute to this behaviour:

1. The site is running several heavily checkout related plugins and customizations, including:
   – NitroPack
   – GTM4WP
   – Meta Pixel
   – multiple discount/cart modification plugins
   – custom theme WooCommerce overrides
   – Zapier integrations
   – custom Elementor integrations
2. There are multiple outdated WooCommerce template overrides, especially checkout related templates:
   – checkout/form-checkout.php
   – cart/cart.php
   – mini-cart.php
   – several email and checkout templates

Outdated checkout templates can sometimes interfere with newer WooCommerce or Stripe checkout flows, especially around AJAX updates, redirect handling, nonce validation, and payment confirmation callbacks.

3. NitroPack and aggressive frontend optimization/caching services are also known to occasionally interfere with payment processing requests or delay Stripe JS callbacks if checkout pages are cached or optimized too aggressively.

At this stage, the most likely causes are:

– A frontend JavaScript interruption during the final Stripe confirmation step
– A delayed AJAX response causing customers to retry checkout
– Checkout page optimization/caching conflicts
– Custom theme or plugin interference with the updated Stripe checkout flow

To narrow this down, I would recommend the following:

1. Ensure the following pages are fully excluded from all caching and optimization layers, including NitroPack, server cache, CDN cache, and Cloudflare if enabled:
   – Cart
   – Checkout
   – My Account
   – Order Pay
   – Order Received
2. Temporarily disable NitroPack optimizations specifically for checkout related scripts and test again.
3. Update all outdated WooCommerce template overrides in the theme, especially checkout related templates: https://developer.woocommerce.com/docs/theming/theme-development/template-structure
4. Perform a conflict test on a staging site:
   – Temporarily switch to Storefront
   – Disable all plugins except:
   – WooCommerce
   – WooCommerce Stripe Gateway
   – Then test several Stripe payments

This will help confirm whether the issue is coming from the theme/customizations or from a third party plugin conflict.

5. Since the customer appears to retry payment after delays, it would also help to inspect the browser console for JavaScript errors during checkout: https://developer.wordpress.org/advanced-administration/debug/debug-javascript/

Additionally, I noticed the site is still using classic order storage with HPOS disabled. While this is not directly causing the issue, HPOS does improve order handling performance and reliability on larger stores: https://woocommerce.com/document/high-performance-order-storage/. Before enabling it, please confirm all active plugins are HPOS compatible.

Please let us know how the staging conflict test goes and whether excluding checkout from NitroPack optimization changes the behaviour.