Abandoned Orders

[metal450]

After having my store live for a few weeks, I've noticed a number of orders left indefinitely as "Pending." As I understand it, this happens when the buyer clicks "Purchase," but doesn't actually complete payment (i.e. with PayPal).

As a possible enhancement, I'd suggest adding a new status of "Abandoned," where a Pending order is changed to Abandoned after an elapsed period of time, and where "Abandoned" orders are not listed as part of "All" on the "Purchase History" page. This is how my previous eStore handled it, which I thought was a nice compromise: the order history remains more accurate, while at the same time you can explicitly check how many users turned back at the last minute (by explicitly viewing the "Abandoned" status).

For instance, in many cases I end up with several "Pending" orders in a row, followed by a "Complete" order by the same user. When looking at my total order count, this erroneously inflates the number, but if these "Pending" orders were "Abandoned" and not included in the "All" list, the order count would more accurately represent the number of orders I've actually received.

[pippinsplugins]

I do really like that idea. Perhaps an order would be considered abandoned if left as pending for one week?

We have to allow at least 4-6 days in order to account for PayPal echecks.

[metal450]

Sure. I might do even longer, just to be safe. Like 10 days. One of my PayPal eCheck receipts says: "It usually takes about 5-7 days for you to receive the money," which makes it sound like it could take even longer than 7.

[metal450]

...Or, perhaps IPN can actually tell you if it's waiting for an eCheck, rather than if the user just never went through? That sounds more likely - that PayPal would have some notification for that.

[pippinsplugins]

I believe there is an IPN that gets sent when an echeck is processing, so perhaps we could record a meta key for "processing" and then exclude any processing orders from getting marked as abandoned.

[metal450]

There ya go :)

[metal450]

One more note about this: I just bought the Affiliates Pro+EDD integration, and it's left with bunches of "Pending" referrals; once you get to this in 1.6, it would be nice if the EDD integration pack would also set referrals to i.e. "Rejected" (or just delete them) when the extra pending orders timeout. i.e. for one order, sometimes I end up with 3 pendings and one actual one - which makes it look like tons of referrals are coming through, when in fact, it was only just the one :)

[chriscct7]

@pippinsplugins Milestone 1.6 please.

[pippinsplugins]

Let's add a new "incomplete" status for this.

[pippinsplugins]

Or should we just use the Failed status? Thoughts?

[metal450]

I'd check what kinds of statuses/events Paypal IPN reports - I think there's a distinct situation for "failed," which is different from my notion of "abandoned" (i.e. something actually went wrong - rather than the user just clicking "Purchase" and then not bothering to fully complete it). "Abandoned" would be distinct from anything Paypal would actually come back to report.

[pippinsplugins]

That's exactly what I was thinking. I'm voting for "incomplete".

[chriscct7]

Why not register a land use an incomplete status?

[chriscct7]

Lol meant to say abandoned

[pippinsplugins]

Do what now?

[chriscct7]

We're trying to distinguish abandoned orders from actual pending orders. We should mark the abandoned ones abandoned.

[pippinsplugins]

lol, I have no clue how your comment above translates to that, but yes, you're right, that's what we need to do.

[pippinsplugins]

Does marking orders as abandoned after one week sound fine?

[pippinsplugins]

Success: http://screencloud.net/v/swGz