EDD Bot marking payments as paid twice adding attendees two times to an event

[Anne-Marie]

Hi,

In March last year I reported an error with the handling of the payments of EDD Tickets (https://theeventscalendar.com/support/forums/topic/edd-bot-marking-payments-as-paid-twice-adding-attendees-two-times-to-an-event/). It then happened twice in 400 sold tickets.

Problem
It looks like the payment is done twice. Because the EDD Bot changes the status from ‘in afwachting’ (awaiting completion) to ‘Voltooid’ (completed) two times the customer receives twice the amount of tickets for which he or she paid for.

Unfortunately the problem is still there and now occurs every other sold ticket. This means my client has to make a lot of manual corrections.

Can you please advice how to fix this.

Kind regards,
Anne-Marie de Haan

[Geoff]

Hi Anne-Marie,

Oh geez, so sorry for the continued trouble here with duplicated orders and tickets with EDD and EDD Tickets.

Like George in the previous thread, I attempted to recreate the issue and was unable to. I am using the latest version of Event Tickets Plus (4.4) which was just released yesterday. I see that you are using version 4.3.5, at least when you opened this topic. Version 4.4 did include some fixes with EDD, so I am hoping that this is easily resolved by updating to the latest version. Will you please update and let us know if the issue continues.

If it does continue, then let’s try to establish some patterns exactly in the way George mentioned in the last thread:

Can you confirm if there’s anything clearly different about the tickets that DO have this problem of their attendees being added twice? Are you able to spot on any pattern about these instances? Anything at all—do they all happen to be free events, for example? Or at a specific venue or time of day? Anything you can think that looks like a pattern….

Let’s start there and see what we find. 🙂

Cheers!
Geoff

[Anne-Marie]

Hi Geoff,

Thanks for your reply. It’s difficult to find a pattern, but here is the situation:

We use the following plugins:
The Events Calendar
Events Ticket
Events Ticket Plus
Easy Digital Downloads
Easy Digital Downloads Gateway Fees
Pronamic iDeal (iDeal is a common Dutch payment method) Payment provider is TargetPay

Our customers don’t have to register, they allways pay with iDeal. There are no free tickets. The problem occurs on different times, different banks, different tickets.

In the screenshot I send before I see twice a notification that payment is completed. I’m not sure what that means and which plugin is making that notification. But the bank account is showing that the payment is done only one time.

Kind regards,
Anne-Marie

[Geoff]

Hey Anne-Marie,

Thanks for the extra information!

What I tried doing is creating a fresh test site. In other words, I downloaded a fresh copy of WordPress and newly downloaded versions of the following plugins:

• The Events Calendar 4.4.0.1
• Event Tickets 4.4
• Event Tickets Plus 4.4
• Easy Digital Downloads 2.6.17

I did not download or install the other EDD extensions since I will only be doing test transactions rather than live ones. I set up EDD to only take test payments in the Downloads > Settings > Payment Gateways screen (screenshot).

From there, I create a new event in The Events Calendar. That event included a ticket (screenshot).

Then, I purchased a ticket and completed the custom registration fields.

Lastly, I checked my Attendee report and saw two things:

• The registration information was collected (screenshot)
• The order was only recorded once (screenshot)

In other words, everything seems to be working correctly.

The next thing I would like to try here is creating a fresh test site — this will avoid any disruption to your live site and ensure that we’ve effectively got a “clean canvas” to work with.

• Please install a fresh copy of WordPress in a subdirectory (if you have a CPanel-type hosting account there will probably be a one-click install script to make this really easy)
• Don’t install anything except The Events Calendar, Event Tickets, Event Tickets Plus and Easy Digital Downloads
• Please also stick to the default WordPress Twenty Sixteen theme — again, there’s no need to install anything else just yet!
• Create a new event with a ticket, then make a few test purchases so we have some test data to work with
• Can you replicate the same problem?

If you find you can replicate the problem under these conditions it would be awesome if you could stop and let us know so we can take a look while the site is still running under default conditions.

Thanks for your help while we work on this together!

Geoff

[Anne-Marie]

Hi Geoff,

I installed a new WordPress site for testing with only the plugins you suggested, but I can’t reproduce the error in this site.

What we notice in the production site:

• customer orders one or more tickets and pays via iDeal
• customer gets 2 e-mails: a receipt with Print tickets – link and an email with the tickets
• administrator gets a notification

when it goes wrong:

• customers gets two e-mails, but for double the amount of tickets (customer paid only ones)
• administrator gets two notifications

In the dashboard we see:

• in the payment history under Downloads we see only one record of the payment
• when we view order details we see under Payment Notes 2x EDD Bot: Status changed from Pending to Complete
• when we check Attendees under the event, we see that ticket(s) have been issued twice
• the stock still shows the correct amount. It is not affected by the double issue

To correct this, my client has to manually delete the attendees under the event and inform the customer he has received a double amount of tickets by accident.

What we also noticed is that the ticket numbers are not unique. But this happens also when there are no problems with the tickets.

Why is there a status change form Pending to Complete twice? I don’t know what triggers that action?

I hope this information helps to find the solution

Kind regards,
Anne-Marie

[Geoff]

Hi Anne-Marrie and thanks for following up!

I installed a new WordPress site for testing with only the plugins you suggested, but I can’t reproduce the error in this site.

This is really interesting. Just to confirm, you are not experiencing any of the issue you have described on the production site on this new testing site, correct?

If that’s the case, let’s continue down this path because what this is telling me is that there is perhaps something installed on the production site that is interfering with things and we’ll want to pinpoint exactly what that is.

First off, will you please send me a link to the new test site? I’d like to have it for reference.

Secondly, will you please install the theme from your production site on the test site? Once you have done that, please test the transaction again and see if the issue of duplicated sales.

If you can recreate the issue with the theme active, let’s stop there. If not, please let me know and we can move on to testing the plugins that are on production to the test site.

Thanks!
Geoff

[Anne-Marie]

Hi Geoff,

I’ve completely recreated our original site for testing purposes at staging.amsterdammusical.nl. Our production site (amsterdammusical.nl) is in full-fledged ticket sales right now: around 30 each day of which two thirds is hitting this issue. It’s causing my customer A LOT of hassle.

Our main hypothesis is that part of the EDD-bot is being kicked into action by completed payments in Pronamic twice. See my earlier post for more detail, but this is what we see:

• when we view order details we see under Payment Notes 2x EDD Bot: Status changed from Pending to Complete
• when we check Attendees under the event, we see that ticket(s) have been issued twice
• the stock still shows the correct amount. It is not affected by the double issue

So we’re assuming the EDD-bot does issue tickets to the customer (and sends out the order confirmation to the admin therefore twice), but doesn’t influence the stock or sends out the tickets to the customer in the same way. I don’t know what exactly triggers each action? Could you enlighten us?

Besides the above the question we wonder why is there a status change from Pending to Complete twice. To verify this issue we’re switching payment provider from TargetPay to Mollie in the coming days to see if the issue will remain.

Let us know about the triggers please.

Thanks in advance,
Anne-Marie (& Niko)

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Anne-Marie.

[Barry]

Hi Anne-Marie (and Niko)!

I’ve taken over this topic as Geoff is currently unavailable.

Unfortunately, I also am unable to replicate: even if I manually adjust a completed payment to ‘abandoned’ or some other status, then restore it to ‘completed’, tickets are not dispatched twice.

The strange behaviour of EDD Bot in your case (EDD Bot of course really just means the action was automatic as opposed to being manually triggered by a real user) is puzzling. I wonder, do you have any other products you sell besides tickets and are they similarly affected, or, if you don’t have any other products, could you create some and test to see if the same thing happens to them?

It’s just possible this is actually unrelated to our ticketing implementation and in fact is something at EDD/payment gateway level … if so, the EDD team themselves (or the vendor of your payment gateway) would be the people best suited to assisting with this, so figuring this out is definitely worthwhile.

Let me know how you get on!

[Anne-Marie]

Hi Barry,

We’ve switched payment gateways (from TargetPay to Mollie) and it seems as if – knock on wood – that our issue has been resolved.

Still, if I were you, I’d still want to know the different triggers. Why is stock not reduced twice but are tickets sent out twice? Wether this is something within EDD or in Event Tickets Plus is not transparent to developers.

Kind regards,
Niko (& Anne-Marie)

[Barry]

Stoked to hear it looks like it is resolved 🙂

I absolutely take your point about trying to understand the triggers, but it is also true that we’ve been wholly unsuccessful in replicating this on our side and haven’t had comparable reports from other users.

That makes this problem fairly unique and so – if it is a core EDD issue – it seems like the best people to help you troubleshoot further would indeed be the EDD team (ditto, if it turned out to be a third party payment gateway issue – the vendor of that plugin may be best placed to help you).

That to say, my only objective in encouraging you to determine that was to get you in the hands of whomever would be best placed to assist further (and that isn’t always going to be us for an environment that uses components from lots of different sources).

At any rate, let’s keep this topic open for the time being.

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

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