Order issues can be a frustrating experience. Here are some general actions you can take to identify root causes of order issues and troubleshoot problems:
- Check the order’s notes for any reference to errors.
- Review your site’s logs for any fatal errors that occurred at the time of the order issue.
- For payment related issues, enable logging for your payment gateway and review those logs for details.
- If the issue is reproducible in testing, you can conduct a conflict test to identify any potential incompatibilities.
Order issues can vary in their causes, but these general steps should be useful in identifying most issues.
Understanding Order Statuses in Relation to Payment Gateways
↑ Back to top| Status | Description | Payment gateway comments |
|---|---|---|
| On hold | The order is awaiting payment confirmation. Stock is reduced, but you need to confirm payment. | Usually seen with payment methods when you need to manually confirm, such as BACS (bank transfer) or cheque. Also seen with payment methods that |
| Pending payment | The order has been received, but no payment has been made. | Most gateways will report back and set the order status to Processing (payment successful) or Failed (payment unsuccessful). If the shop never receives either signal, it keeps the status on Pending payment. A paid order that stays in the Pending payment status tends to be due to a lack of communication between your payment provider and your site. This could be due to a misconfiguration (e.g. webhooks, payment notification URLs) or a plugin conflict. Enable logging for your payment gateway and check the logs to get more details. If you can replicate the issue in testing, consider a conflict test. |
| Processing | Payment has been received (paid), and the stock has been reduced. The order is awaiting fulfillment. | If the payment has been successful the order will be set to Processing. |
| Completed | Order fulfilled and complete. | These generally aren’t interesting because everything has gone correctly. WooCommerce will automatically set the status for orders to Completed if all products in the order are both Virtual and Downloadable. |
| Failed | The customer’s payment failed or was declined, and no payment has been successfully made. | An order can have the Failed status if the hold stock window expired without a response or there is a lack of communication between your payment provider and your site. |
Note: If you are still using the now deprecated and hidden-by-default PayPal Standard functionality and orders are staying in the Pending Payment status after successful payment, you may have an IPN issue. See the troubleshooting section at Debugging IPN Issues
Why aren’t my shop’s orders sequential?
↑ Back to topWhile every order uses a unique order ID, they won’t necessarily be sequential. Order numbers are non-sequential because they share the wp_post database table. This database table is shared with other post types in WordPress — like pages, blog posts, comments, product reviews, and coupons. Each time a new post of any kind is created, it increments the ID number used in the database table by one. So if items of other post types are created between orders, the order IDs will “skip” those IDs that have been used by other posts.
To assign your orders sequential order numbers, you can use an extension like Sequential Order Numbers Pro.
Questions and support
↑ Back to topDo you still have questions and need assistance?
This documentation is about the free, core WooCommerce plugin, for which support is provided in our community forums on WordPress.org. By searching this forum, you’ll often find that your question has been asked and answered before.
If you haven’t created a WordPress.org account to use the forums, here’s how.
- If you’re looking to extend the core functionality shown here, we recommend reviewing available extensions in the WooCommerce Marketplace.
- Need ongoing advanced support or a customization built for WooCommerce? Hire a Woo Agency Partner.
- Are you a developer building your own WooCommerce integration or extension? Check our Developer Resources.
If you weren’t able to find the information you need, please use the feedback thumbs below to let us know.