Automatic Donation Receipt Email After Stripe Payment

Hello @silviaserpe1979,

Glad you reached out, happy to help! What you are describing tells me the donation does not have a “Completed” status, which is required for the emails to be sent, and the donation total to be added to the statistics. Can you check on that please?

Reasons for a donation stuck in “Processing” could be a form error, or not having setup a Stripe webhook.

To solve this, we have a screencast that covers creating the Stripe webhook process in detail.

https://www.loom.com/share/cec585f6fcda4c26999c28fb71e79c47?sid=ae9794b1-b500-4f95-8ecd-5b9af3f08bd4

You’ll be connecting the 8 “events” in the webhook below that I’ve listed in alphabetical order:

• charge.refunded
• checkout.session.completed
• customer.subscription.created
• customer.subscription.deleted
• invoice.payment_failed
• invoice.payment_succeeded
• payment_intent.succeeded
• payment_intent.payment_failed

After that, the next Stripe donation will populate the Last webhook received entry the current date/time in GiveWP > Settings > Payment Gateways – Stripe – General Settings – Stripe Webhooks as seen in this example below:

If that checks out you are good to go for <u>new</u> donations that arrive post-webhook creation. You will, however, have to change any existing donations with the Processing status to a Complete status manually by clicking to edit on the donation. Use your Stripe transactions as a guide when doing so to ensure all payments were successful.

I hope this helps to point you in the right direction! Please let us know if you have further questions 🙂

Hello @silviaserpe1979 ,

Thanks for the updates! Super smart to create the Test Mode webhook in your Stripe account, that is the best way to test donations. I was able to create a donation successfully, here is a screenshot of my donor confirmate page:

https://loom.com/i/8f0a9a16c3f24109bc6cf5edee06f5ea

Don’t forget to also create the same webhook in your live Stripe account as well. Regarding the error you received, I would suggest to try again with a different email address and see if it’s successful.

Have a great rest of your day/evening 🙂

Hello again,

Thank you for the video, I see the issue now! Stripe makes this a little confusing in that they have “sandboxes” and also “test mode”. The blue bar at the top of your screen shows it’s a sandbox, and sandboxes do not connect to external applications. What you want to do is go to your live Stripe account, then click to enable “Test Mode” and add your webhook there. In Test Mode, the top of the screen will have an orange bar as seen in this (silent) video: https://www.loom.com/share/3a5dc4cc810f40868e21d741084fd568

Once in Test Mode, follow the same steps to create your webhook as before. Try another test donation after that. If you still receive an error, we’ll need to see the form log.

Every time a donation is made on your site – or attempted, GiveWP creates a new entry in the logs section that provides additional information on what is happening. The error logs are accessed by going to GiveWP > Tools > Logs. You’re looking for the entry for the date/time of the donation you just attempted. When you find it, click on the “eyeball” icon on the right of the log to expand it to view the contents.  After that, copy/paste the complete log into your next reply. (Note: a screenshot will not show us enough information. Here’s a quick (silent) screencast on how to get the form error log content for us: 

Best regards,

Hello Silvia,

Thanks for sharing the logs! Your Stripe webhook looks good 👍🏻

Looking at the error, it sounds like its an issue we’ve seen where a First Name is missing in the database, even though it shows in GiveWP. There was a migration a long time ago that took care of this, but we’ve had a handful of customers where the migration did not complete.

That error is basically an upgrade issue for the core GiveWP plugin. Meaning, during an update, a database update process did not finish successfully or completely for some reason.

The video below from our senior support technician below explains why the “firstName is required” error is happening, and how to correct it using a code snippet. You’ll want to allow it some time to check all existing donor records, and then it can be deactivated or removed. If you have a full staging site, I would suggest applying it there first. And of course, make sure and take a reliable backup you can restore from of your live site when you’re ready to apply it there.

My colleague made this video to explain some context and how to fix it:
https://www.loom.com/share/3df4fd999b8c46c594ae19d85ffcd47e?sid=0d08909b-c22c-4d2e-973d-66474c710707

The code in the video can be found here: https://gist.github.com/rickalday/0c93e542144d93de78fccee6413da11e.

We recommend adding PHP code snippets to your website via a code snippet plugin. We use this one https://ww.wp.xz.cn/plugins/code-snippets/, however, there are many available that can work.

Also, if you need assistance implementing custom PHP code on your website we have this guide: https://givewp.com/documentation/resources/adding-custom-functions-to-your-wordpress-website/.

Please note that this code snippet is provided as an example of how you can extend GiveWP with code. It’s up to you to implement and customize to your liking. We cannot provide support for custom code on your website, only the code that we create and distribute.

Let me know how things go after you’ve implemented and tested the above! 👍