Matheus Martins

Hi, @bao0603.

I can explain what you are seeing here.

You’ve uncovered an issue that we are investigating here: https://feedback.givewp.com/bug-reports/p/paypal-order-id-missing-error-should-not-prevent-donations-using-paypal-donation. You can use the link to check in for updates, and I’ve also linked your ticket internally, so when the issue is resolved we can reach back out to update you.

This particular error has been a bit of a white whale for our teams, in part because it is generated by PayPal, and in part because we are unable to reliably replicate it. The PayPal order id is sent as a part of the response to the call to PayPal, so it’s sent by PayPal itself. We’ve made repeated efforts to reach out to PayPal to get more information from their side, but they haven’t responded to those attempts thus far. With this being the case, it leaves us unable to troubleshoot, because it become an issue they need to correct from their side of things. We never like to send our users to other support folks, but in this case we are left with very little information and an inability to replicate the problem in a way that will lead us to a fix.

That doesn’t mean we are ignoring this issue! Our teams are continuing our investigation in an attempt to make that necessary forward progress. At the moment, our best recommendation is for PayPal Donations users who are experiencing this error to switch to PayPal Standard. This error isn’t present there, and PayPal Standard is a great option for non-profits. We also highly recommend Stripe as an alternative gateway whenever possible.

I know this was quite a bit of unhappy information to share, and I wish that weren’t the case. My goal is to make online donations as successful and seamless as possible for you, so please let me know if you have any questions about this, I’m happy to help as much as I possibly can. If you’d like more information or a walkthrough for the workarounds I mentioned, I’m happy to field any questions you have about those as well.

No problem!

Thanks for using GiveWP! Have a great day.

Hi, @ulajaskolka.

In this case, I’m unsure if GiveWP is the best solution. The GiveWP plugin is designed to allow you to collect donations on your own site.

It means that when your user clicks to donate, GiveWP loads a form on your site and lets the donor donate right there.

From our research, this is the best method to collect donations, and not redirect users to another website.

If you need to redirect them to other sites, I’d encourage you to create buttons with HTML + CSS or other button creation plugins and then redirect the donor to the URL specified.

​Please let us know if you have further questions or need additional assistance!

Hi, @wtnhistwebmaster.

For a bit of context, this is the order of how GiveWP works with the payment gateway to process the donation:

1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.

2. A donation (and subscription, if applicable) is created on the GiveWP side and set to “pending.”

3. All of the information is sent to the gateway to process the transaction, as well as ongoing subscription renewals.

4. The gateway processes it and notifies the site (via the webhook or IPN) that it went through.

5. GiveWP processes that webhook/IPN and sets the donation to complete.

If the webhook/IPN is unable to reach your site for any reason, the donation will remain “Pending” and eventually change to “Abandoned”.

What happens with PayPal Standard is that if a donor gives up during the payment, PayPal does not communicate it to your website so we keep the donation pending until we are sure that PayPal is not updating your site about the donation status.

It means that if you see it as pending on your website and the donation does not exist in PayPal, it was not completed and will become abandoned.

​Please let us know if you have further questions or need additional assistance!

Glad to hear that, @picturebox1.

We’d love to get a public review about what you think of GiveWP both from a product standpoint as well as how it is to deal with our team. Here are some options:

https://reviews.capterra.com/new/286934/89e00484-d257-4f08-ad39-f8f2ab7461d7?lang=en
https://wordpress.org/support/view/plugin-reviews/give
https://g.page/givewp/review?rc
https://www.facebook.com/pg/wpgive/reviews/

The reviews help others to decide if it’s worth doing business with us!

Have a great day!

Hi, @picturebox1.

Those look like a warning message and not an error, exactly. To hide it, you should disable WP Debug on your site.

You can add the following to your wp-config.php file:

define(‘WP_DEBUG_DISPLAY’, false);

However, if it’s breaking something on your site or stopping donations, let me know.

Lastly, can you give me steps to replicate it? We’ll be happy to dig deeper into this to fix it once and for all too.

Thanks for using GiveWP! Have a great day.

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by Matheus Martins.

Hi, @sportified.

Glad you reached out.

For a bit of context, this is the order of how GiveWP works with the payment gateway to process the donation:

1. The donor fills out the donation form and submits the donation.

2. A donation (and subscription, if applicable) is created on the GiveWP side and set to “pending.”

3. All of the information is sent to the gateway to process the transaction, as well as ongoing subscription renewals.

4. The gateway processes it and notifies the site (via the webhook or IPN) that it went through.

5. GiveWP processes that webhook/IPN and sets the donation to complete.

If the webhook/IPN is unable to reach your site for any reason, the donation will remain “Pending” and eventually change to “Abandoned.”

What could be happening, though, is some kind of conflict on your site that would not send the information to the payment gateway. To verify it, we need a way to reliably replicate the issue.

Also, I accessed your site and clicked here and there, and on the donation form, when I switched the payment gateway on a donation form, I got the following error:

We’re unable to recognize your session. Please refresh the screen to try again; otherwise contact your website administrator for assistance.

This issue here is caused by some caching happening somewhere in the process. If you’re not familiar with caching, it’s a method of saving server resources by storing copies of a page, resource, query, or site so that the next visitor’s visit doesn’t trigger a call to the server at all, they just get the copy that was saved. Basically instead of the site needing to recreate the page from scratch, it sends up a copy which allows it to load faster.
We put together this deep dive into what caching is and how it can cause problems: https://givewp.com/documentation/resources/caching/

Caching works really well for speeding up sites, but when a saved copy of the site has sensitive information in it (like donor info) it’s important that GiveWP not share that with the next visitor. If GiveWP is not convinced that the browser requesting the data is the correct one, it defaults to not showing the data.

Caching is handled differently on various sites and web hosts. This could mean a caching plugin, or caching could be in a security solution. Hosting providers also have settings for caching at the server level, and they can help make adjustments for you there.  Most caching solutions have a setting or section for excluding specific URLs or parts of URLs (called “slugs”) from caching. At the very least, you should exclude the following slugs from caching:

/donations/
/donation-confirmation/
/donor-dashboard/
*any page with a donation form on it
Also, the following query strings (if your caching solution has a setting for them):
give-embed=donor-dashboard
giveDonationFormInIframe=1

Your host or the caching plugin/solution you are using can help with that. Some of them may require what’s called a “wildcard” like /donations/* to capture all subdirectories under the /donations/ folder.

Some folks prefer to customize the URLs to their site pages, so you may find that your URLs don’t have the slugs mentioned above, even though they contain the same content. In cases like those, we recommend whitelisting the page, not just the slug, that way the pages with those essential pieces of information are still excluded from caching. This is especially important for URLs of pages with donation forms on them.

One helpful tip: Check in with your hosting provider. Most hosts have caching at the server level, and they will be able to adjust this for you. You can also temporarily disable caching on the site to confirm that the uncached site isn’t showing the problem. 
Many security solutions include options for caching as well, so be sure to give those settings a look.
While fine-tuning cache falls outside the scope of the support we’re able to provide, your success with online donations is our number one priority, and we’re happy to provide any tips.

I know this was quite a bit of information to share. If you have any questions about this, let me know, I’m happy to help.

Hi, @flaxtrade.

I’ve accessed your site today and noticed that it’s different. Do you still need help here?

Looking forward to helping you get to the bottom of this!

• This reply was modified 2 years, 11 months ago by Matheus Martins.