PAYMENT PENDING error

Hi there,

Thanks for your words of encouragement!

Regarding PayPal Pending Donations, this is how it works:

A pending donation on the PayPal Standard gateway means that after they finish their donation on PayPal.com, the donor didn’t click the “Return to {website}” link for your Donation Confirmation page, or they never completed the donation at PayPal.com at all.

On some PayPal accounts, the first issue can be mitigated by a redirect: PayPal will redirect back to the donation confirmation page on a successful donation after a number of seconds. On other, newer accounts, that’s a paid upgrade.

Being redirected (or clicking) back to the donation confirmation page is crucial in the donation being marked as complete, since there is a slug attached to the end of the URL confirming which donation it is, etc. That slug includes what PayPal calls the IPN or “Instant Payment Notification.” Without the IPN, there’s no way for Give to “know” which payment has gone through to PayPal.

The first thing I would do is check whether you have Donations in PayPal that actually did complete, but are still marked in Give as “Pending”. After around 7 days, if Give did not get the IPN signal for those Pending donations, it will automatically set those donations to “Abandoned” status instead of “Pending” because it will assume that they never completed their Donation.

Lastly, if you find that MOST of the donations in Give that are marked as “Pending” were actually Complete in PayPal.com, then go to “Donations > Settings > Payment Gateways > PayPal Standard” and at the bottom set the “IPN” setting to “Disabled” and see if that helps resolve the issue.

Thanks for using Give!

If they are NOT showing up in PayPal, then they are not being completed at PayPal. Give does not control how the donor is charged once they are at PayPal.com. Basically, Give sends them there, then just waits to hear back whether the donation was complete or not. There’s nothing Give can do to prevent payments from finalizing at PayPal.com.

Would you mind providing a URL to your form so I can test as well?