Tried repeatedly to confirm booking – PayPal payment never recognized

[Paul Hoepfner-Homme]

Hi there,

I purchased and installed the Hotel Booking plugin a little while ago and spent the last week or so configuring it and now testing it. I got my accommodation all configured exactly as desired, pricing rules, etc., and it seems to support all my needs, so thank you for that.

I’ve configured PayPal with my PayPal Merchant Account (I think I have PayPal Payments Standard), and I enabled sandbox mode so I can verify that everything is working before going live. I logged into my PayPal developer account and made sure I had some sandbox accounts set up.

On the MotoPress side, the Confirmation Mode setting is set to “Confirmation upon payment”, and I’ve created a Confirmation Page with a simple thank you message, as well as the shortcode [mphb_booking_confirmation] (following your documentation’s instructions). I’ve also ensured that I’ve created a “Payment Success” page, with another simple success message, and set the Payment Success Page setting (on the Payment Gateways screen) to that page.

I’ve tested making a booking through the system numerous times now, and not once has a booking succeeded from start to finish. Even though i can successfully log into PayPal using my sandbox account and it states that the transaction succeeded, every single booking I’ve created has still resulted in “Pending Payment” status in the MotoPress plugin. It’s never recognized any of the successful PayPal sandbox transactions. I can confirm that PayPal is correctly redirecting me back to my website’s payment success page (for example, http://snowlakekeep.ca/payment-succeeded/?payment_id=881). However, MotoPress Hotel Booking doesn’t seem to respond to the fact that this page has been reached, which I assume is how it finds out that the payment succeeded, right?

I’ve retested the process with the “Disable IPN Verification” settings checked, just to see if that made a difference, but no luck. (It’s unclear to me what exactly that setting does, as it’s not well documented in your documentation.)

I’ve attempted this both on my localhost development machine without luck, as well as the live site (http://snowlakekeep.ca) without luck.

I have no idea what’s left that I can do to get this system to work in Sandbox mode. There’s no point in enabling production mode until I can confirm that sandbox mode is working correctly.

If you have any suggestions for how to make this work, I’m all ears. Thanks.

[Paul Hoepfner-Homme]

I would like to add that the “Test Payment” payment method does work correctly. It’s only paying via PayPal that results in the incomplete reservation process.

[Paul Hoepfner-Homme]

I’d also like to point out that a sandbox test using a Stripe account I just created also succeeded. It’s only PayPal that seems to cause incomplete reservations. Has PayPal been properly tested with this plugin?

[J. Davis]

Hi Paul,

Thank you for your question. Yes, PayPal has been tested successfully with Hotel Booking plugin and you can always test it by registering demo. As far as I can see you do not have active SSL on your site however PayPal seems to require it. I’d recommend to refer to PayPal documentation on that. Let me know if it helps.

[Paul Hoepfner-Homme]

I will try with an SSL certificate. If SSL is the reason this is not working right now, then it really should be documented in your plugin or in your plugin’s documentation, else I won’t be the only one of your customers banging their head against the wall for hours… Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll let you know how it works out.

P.S. I didn’t receive an email notification when you replied to my comment, even though “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” is checked. I had to remember to come back here and check to see if you replied to me.

[Paul Hoepfner-Homme]

I just attempted paying via the PayPal sandbox with an SSL certificate installed, and I had the same result. I was taken to the payment confirmation page, but the system did not acknowledge that the payment was received – it still says “Pending Payment”.

Perhaps your PayPal sandbox mode is not working correctly, and if I disable sandbox mode, it might work… I’ll try that out.

[Paul Hoepfner-Homme]

Okay, so the moment I disabled PayPal sandbox mode (and in doing so I changed the price to $0.01 so that I wouldn’t be charged a unnecessarily large real amount), the booking system finally started working.

I implore you to test your plugin more thoroughly. If you provide a sandbox option for PayPal, but it won’t allow you to complete the booking successfully, then you should document that this will be the case, so customers aren’t wondering why their test bookings aren’t going through.

Sandbox mode works as expected for other payment methods, however, so in my opinion this is a bug in your software. All payment methods’ sandbox mode should allow you to complete the booking process from start to finish.

[Stacy Lind]

Hi Paul,

Unfortunately, we cannot list all the requirements of external platforms in our documentation as they are often not public or change frequently. Please, refer to the documentation of PayPal to correctly configure your account and avoid issues.
PayPal uses IPN to notify websites that a payment went through successfully. When our plugin gets this confirmation, the payment and booking gets completed.
Make sure that IPN is enabled in your sandbox PayPal account. For this log into your PayPal account > Profile > Profile and Settings > My selling tools > Instant payment notifications (Update). Click Edit to insert the link of your website and tick Receive IPN messages (Enabled).
If it still does not work for you, you can submit a support ticket and we will check the problem on your installation.

[Author]

Posts