WPEC Tickets – "Free" (blank admission price defaults to $0 and PayPal Fails)

[Tom]

I recently added WPEC Ticket plugin (in addition to ModernTribe Events Calendar and Calendar Pro) after getting the calendar and events working with sample data. While working on ticket price, the field after-note stated that I should be allowed to enter either a “blank” or “0” to represent “free” admission.

On the Event Record:
When I enter “$0”, the Shopping Cart still attempts to go out to PayPal. It can’t complete a “$0” transaction, and the screen/field validation process won’t let you go back to the main site using the “cancel” option”.

When I attempt to change the value from “$0” to “blank”, it continues to default back to “$0” and repeats the above described process (fail and no cancel).

I then attempted to delete the record that had started with a “$0” and tried to ensure the initial value was “blank” for the brand new record, and it too reverted to “$0” and failed.

Edit Product record:
I then attempted to apply these changes in the Product listing for the item… and got the same results (default to $0 and failed).

I’m hoping I’m missing some simple configuration switch somewhere, but I scanned everything I could find and didn’t spot anything.

While I’ve read your stickies about deactivating all plugins and dropping back to a base theme (which I did), the site URL you have for me is currently running the intended theme and all other plugins.

Please tell me this is something simple. Tom C.

[Barry]

Hi Tom,

I can understand that must be pretty frustrating however as best I can tell this is expected behaviour with WP E-Commerce. I did find this post which might be helpful in working around this situation, however:

WP e-Commerce, how to process $0.00 sales and 100% coupons which PayPal will not accept

Unfortunately the forum post it references has since been deleted, but the above might be sufficient by itself to help you resolve this.

Beyond that, you would really need to take this question over to the WP E-Commerce forums and seek their assistance as, best I can tell, this problem is one with the actual e-commerce platform and/or the payment gateway implementation (the same thing occurs with a free product, independently of WPEC Tickets).

 

[Tom]

Barry,
Thanks for the quick response and guidance. I’m not actually frustrated with the plugin (actually really like it)… more concerned that I was overlooking something.

I looked at the code snippet on the link you provided, and it does look like it would do the job. I have to tinker with the “Thank You” page to ensure I understand how that transaction/page flow will work… but I do think I understand how it will intercept the call to PayPal and definitely see how it will set the indicator properly (hopefully that is the IPN) in my database. I’m assuming the presence of a valid IPN will then allow the member to show up on your “Attendee List” (they currently don’t show since the PayPal call never responds) and then also allow the “Checkin” function to work.

I will also open a ticket with WP e-Commerce. As you noted, this is really their issue with handing off “$0 transactions” to PayPal. The code snippet pretty much proves that. Hopefully they’ll respond or have something coming in a future roll-out to fix this.

I hope you don’t mind that I would like to leave this thread open for the rest of today (or to the weekend) until I get a chance to test the downstream WPEC Tickets functions (listed above) and verify they work as I hope/designed using this code fix. Plus, if I get anything interesting back from WP e-Commerce, I’ll post it here to aid anyone else who may have the same question.

I can’t thank you enough for getting back to me so quickly and providing this solution. – Tom C.

[Barry]

Happy to help: we can certainly leave this open a little longer.

[Barry]

This thread’s not seen much activity for the last couple of weeks so I’ll go ahead and close it. Of course if you still need help with this or any other issue please don’t hesitate to create a new thread (or threads) and one of the team will be only too happy to help. Thanks!

[Author]

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