Customer Double Charged

  • Resolved zoonars

    (@zoonars)


    2 years, 9 months ago

    Hello everyone, I appreciate any support I can get on this matter.

    I had a situation today where a customer paid twice for the invoice I sent out, which resulted in a double charge on her end. Obviously issuing the refund we lost out on the transaction fee, so I’m willing to let this one go but would like to figure out how to prevent this from happening again.

    Here is the exact testimonial from the customer: “I went in to pay the invoice this morning, and it looks like my card was charged twice. I attempted to place order, but the screen didn’t do anything, and I didn’t receive an order confirmation, so proceeded to do so again. Totally my fault. “

    I requested for more information if they can describe with more details what happened. I saw the two transactions were 9 minutes apart, each with their own Payment ID but same Fingerprint.

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)
  • Plugin Author Clayton R

    (@mrclayton)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    Hi @zoonars

    It sounds like a 3rd party plugin triggered a PHP error during the payment process. Lots of plugins hook in to the post payment hooks that WooCommerce provides. If those plugins trigger an exception, it can interfere in the order’s status being updated to processing/completed and thus make WooCommerce think the payment hasn’t been taken.

    Navigate to your WooCommerce > Status > Logs page and look for a fatal-error log. That will have the location of the plugin that triggered the error.

    If you find that log, please share its contents.

    Kind Regards

    Thread Starter zoonars

    (@zoonars)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    Thanks for the quick response. I did find another old thread with a similar issue, and the advice was to find the fatal-error log, but I couldnt find it on my end. That thread ended up going into something about ngix and server latency, which is completely out of my range of comprehension since my website is on a hosted server (Bluehost).

    Is there anything else I can check?

    Thread Starter zoonars

    (@zoonars)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    Here is another testimonial I got from my customer “When I hit the ‘pay now’ button during the first transaction, nothing happened, other than that button being greyed out. It didn’t take me to an order confirmation page. I get email alerts on my credit card transactions, and didn’t get one within 15 minutes, so I completed the transaction again. After that, 2 charges came through in that same amount. “

    Plugin Author Clayton R

    (@mrclayton)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    but I couldnt find it on my end

    Did the log file not exist or you were having trouble locating it? All logs are located by going to the WordPress Admin – WooCommerce – Status – Logs.

    Kind Regards

    Thread Starter zoonars

    (@zoonars)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    The log does not exist.

    Plugin Author Clayton R

    (@mrclayton)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    Hi @zoonars

    Is there a test log file? It could be that your server permissions are setup in such a way that log files can’t be created on your hosted server. I’d ask your hosting provider if they can make sure the WordPress uploads folder has the correct permissions so that log files can be written to.

    This double charge looks very much like a 3rd party plugin triggered an error during the payment process. That is almost always the cause when a customer pays twice for an order.

    Kind Regars

    Thread Starter zoonars

    (@zoonars)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    WooCommerce does show log files with recent dates, though nothing with “fatal” in the name near the date the issue occurred. I do see a “wc-stripe” log. This is the entire log file:

    2023-08-04T12:19:10+00:00 INFO Webhook notification received: Event: payment_intent.succeeded 2023-08-04T12:19:10+00:00 INFO Webhook notification received: Event: charge.succeeded

    2023-08-04T12:28:52+00:00 INFO Webhook notification received: Event: payment_intent.succeeded 2023-08-04T12:28:52+00:00 INFO Webhook notification received: Event: charge.succeeded

    Thread Starter zoonars

    (@zoonars)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    I suppose we wont get to the bottom of this, but can you suggest how I can setup any debug logs or anything like that in case this reoccurs in the future?

    Plugin Author Clayton R

    (@mrclayton)

    2 years, 9 months ago

    Hi @zoonars

    You mentioned that you found a previous thread and the issue was related to NGINX config. I’d recommend showing that to your hosting provider and asking them to double check your webserver settings.

    All PHP exceptions that are thrown are captured in the WooCommerce fatal-error log. There isn’t any additional logging you can turn on that would shed light on what caused that issue.

    Kind Regards

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

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