I recently ran into an issue on one of my client’s sites. Their WooCommerce PayPal Advanced Payments Gateway for WooCommerce (IgniteWoo) all of a sudden wasn’t working correctly. It would process the payment, but the site didn’t record that a payment was completed. They received payment confirmation from PayPal, but not the completed order e-mail generated by WooCommerce.
Furthermore, upon completion of payment information the the embedded iframe that the payment gateway lives in would reload with a notice to confirm my humanity by filling out a CAPTCHA field. After filling out the CAPTCHA the website would reload inside the iFrame resulting in the disruption of information being sent back and forth.
Troubleshooting
- I tried changing settings with in the plugin interface.
- Double-checked account information.
- Went through the setup and made sure all the settings inside https://manager.paypal.com/ were correct.
- Checked the WordPress forums for an answer and tried several proposed fixes. Discussion can be found here.
As far as I could tell everything was setup as it should be. My last step to remedy this problem was to contact the plugin developer, so I gave IgniteWoo a call. If you have ever called a support line for anything you know that it can be very frustrating and you can be put on hold, be left punching in the numbers that the robot voice told you to, or speak with someone from India or the Philippines; neither of which is ideal.
After a few rings I was pleasantly surprised that an actual human being answered the phone. Not only was it a living, breathing person, but it just happened to be the person who wrote the plugin that I was inquring about. We talked about my problem and went through the plugin settings to make sure it was setup right. We were still stumped. Then the author mentioned that it had to be a conflict with another plugin, because their PayPal Advanced Gateway Plugin did not have any CAPTCHA included with it. He said to find out if any other plugins are utilizing CAPTCHA.
I quickly determined that I had installed the Stop Spammer Registration Plugin a few days earlier.
I disabled the plugin and everything worked as it should. After a several hours of pulling my hair out, I was a bit embarassed that the solution was so simple. This is often the case.
Note to self: Always disable plugins systematically to see if the cause of the error is a conflict with another plugin. I know this, but don’t always do it.
To inform others about the conflict between the IgniteWoo’s WooCommerce PayPal Advanced Payments Gateway and Stop Spammer Registration Plugin, I posted a topic in the WordPress.org forum. You can find the thread here.
Shortly after posting I received a reply from Keith, the author of Stop Spammer Registration Plugin. Keith surmised that gateway callback was breaking some rule and that you would need to find out the IP address range of woo commerce gateway and add it to the whitelist.
I haven’t tested this out, so if anyone has done this I would be interested in hearing if it was successful or not.
