Why am I Seeing Pending Transactions?

The normal process for transaction actions on any gateway or payment method, is that when the user starts the checkout process a “Pending” transactions is added in MemberPress. Once the checkout process is complete, and MemberPress receives a confirmation from the payment processor that the payment was successful, the transaction is changed to “Complete” in MemberPress. 

Usually, this happens almost instantly. But sometimes there can be a lag, for this reason, MemberPress allows 24 hours for the payment to come through. If transactions are still pending after 24 hours, then this could indicate a problem. 

There are two main reasons why a transaction are stuck as pending from any gateway:

1. The user didn't complete the registration process and abandoned checkout before submitting their CC details or,
2. Your gateway configuration is not set up correctly.

You can always tell the difference between the two because with the first (abandoned registration), there will be NO transaction or subscription created in the respective gateway (i.e. in your PayPal account, the Stripe Dashboard, etc. – NOT in MemberPress). 

Whereas with the second issue (gateway misconfiguration) there WILL be a transaction (could be completed or failed) and/or a subscription in the gateway, but it shows up as pending in MemberPress. See below for how to deal with these issues respectively:

1. Abandoned Registration

To help prevent this in the future, you can enable a reminder to be triggered X days after a user abandons checkout to encourage them to return and finish the process. This email can also be enabled to send to you as admin, so you know can be notified when this happens. 

To learn more about our reminders, please visit
this page. 

To resolve any signups that happened before you created the reminder, please have your users do
exactly this:

1. Login to your site.
2. Navigate to your registration process to correctly complete the process.

2. Gateway Misconfiguration 

To help prevent this in the future, you will need to verify your gateways configuration based on the instructions given in the various links for our supported gateways as shown below. Please note that your gateway must be setup
exactly as outlined on that page to avoid any issues. 

Offline Payments
PayPal Digital Goods (Express Checkout)
PayPal Standard
Stripe
Authorize.net
Manual Transactions

The way that you fix any users who signed up while your gateway was not properly setup, will depend on the type of subscription. 

Automatically Recurring Subscription 

You will need to import the subscription as outlined
here. After adding the Subscription, it will likely be easier for you to manually add the transaction instead of importing the Transaction CSV file. 

Non-Recurring (One-Time Payment) Subscription

Because there will be no future automatic billings, you just need to make sure that the user has a complete transaction associated with the correct Membership. 

You can do this by simply editing a\the user's pending transaction (if one was created) by hovering over its unique transaction ID, and then clicking the Edit option, to mark it from ‘Pending' to ‘Complete'. Or you can
manually add the transaction.