PayPal says my payment is complete, but my order says Awaiting Payment, why?

05 Sep 2010

Support Center » Knowledgebase » PayPal says my payment is complete, but my order says Awaiting Payment, why?

	PayPal says my payment is complete, but my order says Awaiting Payment, why?

Solution Like all websites that use PayPal for payment processing, we must wait for PayPal to send us an electronic notification to signal that an order has been successfully completed. The technical term for this notification is called Instant Payment Notification and you can read all about it at https://paypal.com/ipn, but it all boils down to this: the notification is usually very quick, but sometimes very slow, and never instant.

Typically, after a customer places an order and completes a payment using PayPal, we receives the "payment complete" notification from PayPal within seconds or at most minutes. As soon as we receives this notification, the website automatically updates the order from "Awaiting Payment" to "Processing" and the order is then expedited to be fulfilled. Everyone is happy.

However, there are times when PayPal takes an unusually long time in sending the "payment complete" notification, some times up to 2-3 hours after the customer has completed the payment process. During this time, the customer may have received an email from PayPal confirming that the payment was complete, and may see in his PayPal account that the payment is complete. But since PayPal does not send the "payment complete" notification to us in a timely manner, we have no way of knowing that the payment has been completed.

We cannot rely on the email notification from PayPal because emails can easily be forged. PayPal themselves adovate against using email as an indication of a completed payment for this very reason. PayPal also made recent changes to their system so that even if we were to login to our PayPal account, the newest transactions are not be available for viewing. So we are stuck without a way to verify that a PayPal payment has been completed.

We understand that customers feel extremely frustrated during this time and it apears that we are refusing to process an order that a payment has been made for. But we hope our customers understand that since we rely on PayPal to tell us when a payment has been completed, this is a situation that we have very little control over. Luckily, these types of long delays are not frequent, and most payment notifications are received very quickly.

Please contact one of our helpful customer service representatives via email or live chat if you have any additional questions.

Article Details

Article ID:

Created On:

07 Feb 2008 02:25 AM