Hello guys, I’ve just received a notification regarding "Network issues affecting some third-party payments " and follow the guideline to check on my third party payment apps like Paypal, but failed to find any discrepancy on them. However, there is a large amount of discrepancy between my Facebook Ads Manager’s Purchase Metric and my Shopify Admin Orders page. Facebook Purchase Metric has been reporting 30% more orders for the past few days, while Shopify Admin is not reporting these orders, and I believe that my clients did pay for the lost orders. At this moment in time, I have 3 questions for Shopify.
First, how do I find the lost orders?
Second, how can I even create the order or refund the money to my clients when I don’t have their information?
Third, who is going to pay for my Facebook Ads Spending for these lost orders?
Lastly, and this is not a question. I should be looking forward to hear from my clients, who paid for their lost orders and complaint about this problem in the near future. I am not going to have a great time. That’s for sure.
I’m Miles from the Social Care team at Shopify. I’m sorry to hear you’re seeing these discrepancies. Firstly, I’d like to draw your attention to this post. Have a read of this post as it should answer some of your questions.
These discrepancies are only affecting third-party payment platforms at this stage. If you head to Settings > Payments in your Shopify Admin, you’ll see a list of payment providers. Anything that’s not Shopify Payments is considered third-party, so note down which providers you’re using. Then, you can head directly to your account with those gateways to see if there are any orders missing from your admin. It’s good to note that the orders are being accepted by these gateways, meaning you’ll be able to see them in your account with them, just not your Shopify account. If you cannot find any discrepancies or missing orders, then you’re not affected by this issue.
In regards to the reporting discrepancies, I’d recommend checking your abandoned carts (Orders > Abandoned Carts) to see if Facebook Metrics have included those orders as successful orders. When looking at your analytics, Shopify will show you what orders your store has taken regardless of the gateway. Facebook Metrics will show anything they believe has gone through as a sale - even if it hasn’t. In short, Shopify’s analytics is your source of truth, as they’re connected directly to your store.
To answer your specific questions:
To find any potentially lost orders, follow the steps above. For example, you’ll log into your PayPal account to see if there are any orders in there that aren’t showing up in your admin. You’ll be able to fulfil the order directly with them.
Again, if there are no discrepancies, then there are no lost orders. If there are missing orders, your customers’ details will be within the third-party’s platform.
As per section 9 of Terms of Service, we’re not able to offer compensation for your Facebook ads. This issue has not affected the ads themselves, or their metrics.
I can appreciate that you may have a difficult time if you are missing orders, so if there’s anything Shopify can do to help you through that, please let me know.
In these kinds of situations it is highly unlikely that Facebook Ads Manager is reporting actual purchases, while Shopify is not. This is most likely a Facebook pixel misfire (which do happen occasionally—and can be caused by a variety of factors).
The easiest way to check is by going to your payment provider and go through the list of incoming payments, matching them with your orders, for the same period. If you don’t see any additional payments that do not correspond to any orders on Shopify, then you did not lose any orders. You can also use any another analytics tool you might have in place, to verify (such as Google Analytics).
What can sometimes occur (which has become an increasing issue for EU customers for over a year now), is that a customer will begin the process of checking out and paying, get stumped by the 2-factor authentication process (EU’s PSD2 directive), and close the order window before a confirmation message can be sent to Shopify (so they never view the Thank you page). This can sometimes result in a payment, without an actual order being recorded. You just need to double check and create a paid draft order for the same products (in this situation you will have the data readily available on your Abandoned carts tab). Even if that were the case though, Facebook pixel would still be unable to count that as a purchase, since the thank you page was not visited (and the pixel did not fire).
Overall, Facebook reporting can be highly inconsistent at times, so I wouldn’t use it as a gauge for your sales.
Thanks for the quick reply. Please note that Facebook logs more Purchase pixel fires and not fewer purchases. 30% more purchases are showing up in Ads Manager.
Indeed, this can happen because the purchase event fires several times instead of just once per order (oftentimes the {% if first_time_accessed %} condition is ignored, and a single customer visits the order confirmation page a few too many times).
We have had orders where the customers have paid via PayPal (the customer has shown me the screengrab of their PayPal account and they have been charged by paypal for the sale with our shop) but:
the order is not showing up in my orders (it’s showing up in Abandon checkouts only), and
their money isn’t showing up in my paypal account.
So as far as I’m concerned, the sale simply hasn’t occurred either in Shopify or PayPal. But the customers are following up with me wondering where their order is and showing me their paypal account, which has been charged.
I’ve read the blog post originally posted by Shopify which said to either:
create a draft order and send to the customer to complete the transaction, or
send them the abandon cart link, to complete the transaction,
The issue is that as far as the customer is concerned, they HAVE already paid for the sale (as per their paypal account) so they aren’t willing to check out for a second time as they don’t want to get charged twice, which is fair enough,
My question is, how do I capture these orders and get these PayPal payments?
Thanks for tagging onto this thread. I understand this is a bit of a mess for you, but I’ll be happy to help point you in the right direction.
Firstly, we need to check that the customers order on PayPal was fully processed. It may be pending, or authorised, which doesn’t mean the transaction has gone through yet. To be sure of this, you’ll need to contact PayPal and let them know what’s happening (i.e. customer has made a payment, but you don’t see anything in your PayPal account, and Shopify has it listed as an abandoned cart). From there, PayPal will be able to advise you on next steps (which would likely be forwarding you the customers payment).
If they do forward the payment to you, then you would just need to create a draft order in Shopify (Orders > Create Order), and add in the products the customer ordered and mark the invoice as paid (so that you don’t charge the customer again). That way, you are paid, your Shopify admin is up to date and your customer is happy.
If PayPal decides to just cancel the transaction entirely and return the money to the customer, then you can go through the steps you mentioned about resending the abandoned cart email or creating a draft invoice and send it to the customer to make the payment again - as they’ll already have their money back from PayPal.
I hope that helps to clarify, but please let me know if you’re still facing issues. Thanks!