Table of Contents
Understanding Order Statuses in Relation to Payment Gateways #
| STATUS | DESCRIPTION | PAYMENT GATEWAY COMMENTS |
| ON HOLD | Awaiting payment – 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.
You’ll also see this when the gateway is set to authorize instead of capture a charge: the shop owner will need to manually switch the status to processing. |
| PENDING | Order received (unpaid). | 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.
This tends to be a misconfiguration of payment notification URLs or a plugin conflict. |
| PROCESSING | Payment received and stock has been reduced- the order is awaiting fulfillment. All product orders require processing, except those for Digital/Downloadable products. | If the payment has been successful and the order does not contain Digital or Downloadable products, the order will be set to Processing.
This is the shop owner/warehouse’s cue to ship the order and manually mark it as completed. |
| COMPLETED | Order fulfilled and complete – requires no further action | These generally aren’t interesting because everything has gone correctly. |
| FAILED | Payment failed or was declined (unpaid). | The order can be manually cancelled, but this status can come up if the payment window has expired. It can happen for a few reasons:
● order was abandoned before payment was complete ● The hold stock window expired without a response ● Same reasons as Pending |
| AUTHENTICATION REQUIRED | Customer must complete requirements for SCA. | It can occur when:
● a new customer makes a purchase ● an existing subscription renews |
