How to remove canceled payment pending order

[subtlechains]

I had someone place an order through paypal but the payment never went through. The order has been canceled in shopify but it still says payment pending and unfulfilled. Is there any way to remove this order from my list of orders? It's very frustrating having a canceled order just sitting there and being unable to remove it. Even when I have fulfilled all orders it still says that I have 1 order left. It makes things pretty confusing and messy.

[Miles]

Hi, @subtlechains!

I'm Miles from the Social Care team at Shopify. Thanks for reaching out around the issue with cancelling your order. Assuming you've already cancelled the order in the Shopify Admin and it's archived, that's essentially all you need to do. If the order is showing up as payment pending, you'd need to make sure everything is cancelled on your PayPal account as well. Head over to your PayPal dashboard and locate the order and make sure the payment that is pending is cancelled. If it isn't cancelled, you'll need to contact PayPal for support to remove this as well.

At this stage, for business security, you're not able to delete orders unless they were a test or if the order was created in a draft (Orders > Drafts > Create order). You can also cancel orders that were paid for outside of Shopify or any of your connected gateways (i.e. cash). We've got a guide that may help you understand a little more about cancelling and deleting orders.

Until the pending payment has been cancelled, the order will remain listed as open - even if it's cancelled and archived. The reason for this is that the system is still expecting the payment to come through or be rejected before it can close the order off. As I mentioned above, the fastest way to do this would be to contact PayPal. In the meantime, I've submitted this as feedback on your behalf to our products team to consider changing this process in the future. This doesn't guarantee a change will occur, but it will notify them of the disruption to your business so they can consider it. In the meantime, just make sure the order is fully processed before cancelling or archiving the orders if a similar situation arises.

Did you know that you can also customize your order page? For example, you can use the Unfulfilled filter to view a list of all your store's unfulfilled orders. You can also combine filters to see orders that match multiple criteria. For example, you can combine the Low risk and Unpaid filters to view a list of your store's orders that are both low risk and unpaid. We have a great guide that will walk you through this and it may act as an alternative while you wait for the order payment to process or cancel. You can check out the guide here: https://bit.ly/3mk0SOJ.

To learn everything Shopify has on offer around orders, you can also check out our main guide on orders.

I hope this helps to clarify the issue, but please let me know if you need any other assistance with this.

[subtlechains]

It appears the order is cancelled in paypal as well but still sitting as unfulfilled in shopify even once archived so turning on the filter unfortunately doesn't help in this respect.

[rosieneedshelp]

I really need help.  I am not taking payments online - but when I just updated several customers orders, unbeknownst to me an invoice went out to them asking them for payment.  Several paid online with credit cards.  Now the orders have 'payment is pending' on their orders.  How do I return/stop those payments.  I do not accept credit cards and did not set that up in Shopify.  Nor am I allowed to accept credit card payment.

Help!!!!!

[GabbyG1]

The reference provided to the guide on canceling and deleting orders does not offer clear instructions on how to effectively cancel orders paid for outside of Shopify. Specifically, when we cancel an order set for manual payment method (where payment is due upon invoice), the order remains in a "Payment pending" status. Deleting the archived order isn't a viable solution, as it would result in gaps in the invoice sequence and potential accounting issues.

Could you please provide guidance on the proper procedure for canceling orders paid for outside of Shopify, especially those set for manual payment methods? We need a solution that ensures accurate order management without compromising our invoicing and accounting processes.

[Imogen]

Hi there, @GabbyG1. Thank you for taking the time to follow up on this thread regarding order cancellations, specifically for orders where payment was collected outside of Shopify.

If you haven't collected payment for an order, and you wish to cancel that order, then you can do so by following the instructions outlined in our help documents here. If you haven't collected payment, then your reports should reflect that no payment was collected for this order, and you should be fine to archive it, and delete it if you choose to do so.

If you feel that these steps don't address the specific transaction and the needs around that transaction, then please reach out to our Authenticated Support Team for guidance. They can get you authenticated, look into the details of this order with you, and examine any potential issues you see occurring with your analytics as a result of cancelling that order.

[GabbyG1]

Thank you for replying. I want to clarify that we understand how to cancel and how to archive orders. What we do not understand is how to get rid of the incorrect "Payment pending" status after the order is canceled and archived.

As I mentioned above we created an order with a manual payment method. Then we canceled the order because our client changed their mind. Since there is no external payment provider, please explain what is keeping the canceled and archived order in the status "Payment pending" and how to get rid of this status? The expected status is "Voided".

[idorulive]

We also have this problem. Orders which were created intended to be paid by bank transfer are cancelled, and marked as cancelled, but they are still tagged as 'Payment pending' and 'Unfulfilled' which is confusing. Surely a cancelled order should obviously remove these tags as the statuses do not apply any more?