PayPal have a payment status known as ‘pending’.

In the case of payments, this applies where the seller needs to capture the payment made by the customer.  If the seller fails to do this within 30 days, the payment expires.

A customer can also cancel a pending payment before the seller has captured it.

This presents a problem for retailers, as there is the potential that goods could be shipped to the customer without the payment being taken successfully.

To handle this on the Citrus-Lime ecommerce platform, when a customer attempts to make a payment for their web order using PayPal, the ecommerce platform looks at the response it receives back from PayPal.

If this response is ‘pending’, the ecommerce platform will respond to PayPal to ask them to cancel the request for payment.  

Should that cancellation not be confirmed by PayPal, the platform will complete the web order, but will mark it with the comment that the PayPal payment is pending.

This notifies the retailer that they should investigate further before processing the transaction in Cloud POS.

If PayPal confirm the request to cancel the payment, the following message will be displayed to the customer: