"Pending" is not in list of status in Configuration>"EMail setting"

[nino59]

Hi,

I am using Joomla 3.5 + VirtueMart 3.0.14

I was nicely surprised by the quantity of people who want to send a mail when a product is ordered and payment done. THis is the case of payment by bank transfer or by cheque. So I thought VM team add this feature.

It is normal to send a mail to the admin (at least) and the buyer to confirm we received his order and we will process it as soon as payment is done.

I don't understand why VM team remove or didn't add this functionality.
If it exist, I am sorry but I am a simple Internet entrepreneur, not Engineer in NASA.


I search and read for a solution. It seems to be in configuration of payment plugin or in Configuration>EMail setting.

The problem is there is not "Pending" status in the list.

See screenshot below:
http://prntscr.com/ca5p5q

Is there anyone who can tell me how a notification mail can be sent to admin and buyer when order is PENDING?

Kind regards

[jenkinhill]

Pending means that an order process has started, but payment has not been completed. So no mail should be sent to the buyer thanking them for their order.

For explanation of order status see http://docs.virtuemart.net/manual/general-concepts/220-orders.html

[GJC Web Design]

THis is the case of payment by bank transfer or by cheque.

create a new Status e.g. "Awaiting Payment" etc

then apply this as the state of the confirmed cheque etc and set this to send the email

[nino59]

Thanks for your quick answer.

I suggest you to create a survey and ask the community:
VM should send a notification mail for pending status?
Yes  No

It seems, a majority would say yes.


I am bothering you with that because I love VM and I wish it could fit one day all my requirement.

Great job guys for VM!

[jenkinhill]

In earliier VM2 versions mails were being sent out on pending, confusing shoppers and shop owners. Following a lot of complaints it was removed as pending and the option included to create you own order status where a shop owner wanted to confirm a purchase that had not yet been paid for.  Sounds like the best option to me.

[GJC Web Design]

and has been discussed quite a few times on here.. it is very little effort to make and apply a new status

[zaldiar]

I use Joomla 3.7.2 + VM 3.2.2.

I totally agree whith Nino59 : even if we can understand the strategic choice of the developpers, those developpers may really understand that we are not in their heads, and their tehnical choices may become ergonomic choices which must be clearly (and understandable !) displayed on settings proposed to the webmasters. And this is unfortunately an old general problem for virtuemart which suffer from a lack of ergonomics (take a look in Prestashop to see what clear settings means).

So for this problem it's really obvious to propose a check box in settings to permit to user to choose if "pending" status may send notifications or not, and to who. To avoid confusing client plaese propose cleared choices, which could may be :

PENDING STATUS :
# choice 01 : "défault activated- don't send notification to Anyone"
# choice 02 : "Send notification to ADMIN"
# choice 02 : "Send notification to ADMIN and CLIENT"


And notice that some native payment plugin have also this deficiency :

=> PAYBOX payment plugin doesn' have the usual choice of what status may be assigned to "pending  order". You can only set status for the "accepted" orders and the "Cancelled" order, but not for "pending" order ! It's obviously essential to notify the shop owner that a client had a banking problem, if you want to help him to resolve it or to pay his order in another way.

I have this problem a few days ago : my client called me to complain not having received the notification of a client which had a card payment problem. My client realized the problem because it has phoned the client (for another eason) and he told him that problem in order. It was finally embarrassing for me to explain that we can't send notificatoin when pending status is generated....!

[AH]

It was finally embarrassing for me to explain that we can't send notificatoin when pending status is generated....!

It was probably more embarrassing to explain to them that this has been base functionality for years and that you had not tested the end to end customer/vendor experience.

It's obviously essential to notify the shop owner that a client had a banking problem, if you want to help him to resolve it or to pay his order in another way.

I would expect a serious e-commerce store owner to review their orders and not expect emails to run their business.  In the days of poor internet speeds and limited access - that might have been the way - but today I am stunned that a professional store is expecting to manage their orders based on email activity.

Proposing a software update is fine if such an update enhances the platform - but VM has operated like this since VM2  - a search of the forums will reveal much about this change.

If you have not shown your client the VM order list and how to refresh a web page - then maybe you can start there.

However:- There is no one stopping you from creating your own customisation to meet your client's needs.

Or you could ask the development team for a quote to develop the option for you.

Currently:

A status of "P" is set by VM as soon as an order is saved to the database and is seen as a technical step between an order being saved and a payment attempt by the customer.  As you note - this step does not trigger any email to anyone.

The detail that is shown in the PayPal configuration regarding "Pending transactions" is related to a response from PayPal which states that they have "seen" the transaction and they are "handling it" - it is not yet a completed payment.  This can trigger emails.

It's obviously essential to notify the shop owner that a client had a banking problem

There is no evidence that the customer had any banking problem - they may have just decided not to complete a payment for whatever reason.

That said, the store owner can review orders via the VM admin and decide what to do with those in a pending state.

[Milbo]

Pending is an order which is NOT confirmed by the shopper. And the Pending order status IS available for the vendor. There are TWO dropdowns, one for the SHOPPER, and one for VENDOR.

So when you want to help a user, you can activate the pending for your vendor. BUT, the pending is always generated and then set to "confirmed by shopper" when the shopper does the last step and uses the "confirm" button.
So your vendor would be just spammed by more mails. He would need to check for emails with pending status, which are not followed within minutes by an email with "confirmed by shopper" status.

For this problem, I suggest a live chat 3rd party plugin. We could solve it internally only with a kind of cron job, which checks for pending orders any minute and sends an email, when the pending keeps pending over a certain treshold time.

I think it makes more sense to
- use a live chat system, or
- add a "help me live" button, which sends an email to the vendor with the topic "HELP" and directly with phone number and so on.