Why is a paid order still marked as abandoned in my cart?

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

A customer’s PayPal payment was processed, but the order appears as an abandoned cart in Shopify instead of a completed purchase.

Root Cause:
This rare issue occurs with external payment gateways when the redirect back to Shopify is interrupted after payment. Common triggers include:

  • Customer clicking the browser back button
  • Closing the browser window
  • Internet connection dropping during redirect

Result: PayPal receives and processes the payment, but Shopify never creates the order.

Recommended Solution:
Once payment confirmation from PayPal is verified, create a draft order in Shopify using the available guide. This approach:

  • Provides an order reference number
  • Maintains accurate inventory tracking
  • Allows order completion within the system

Additional Suggestion:
Check store analytics to review tracking setup and ensure proper monitoring of the checkout process.

Summarized with AI on November 24. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.
1

I have a customer who is telling me PayPal has taken her money out on the order but it’s still sitting as an abandon cart in my Shopify. How do I go about getting this corrected and find out what’s going on?

2

Hey @Prbymel!

This can happen very rarely with orders that are paid using an external gateway, a gateway that takes you to another site to pay, like PayPal. What happens here is when your customer pays for the order, the redirection back to Shopify is interrupted. While the payment gateway receives the payment, and it’s sent to your account, the order never is created by Shopify. This can easily happen when your customer clicks the back button on their browser, closes out of their browser, or if their internet connection drops temporarily during the order process.

If you’ve confirmed you have received payment with the third party gateway, you can easily remedy this situation by creating a draft order using this guide right here. This will keep track of the inventory in Shopify, and give you an order to reference. Recreating it as a draft order would be the next best thing and allows you to complete this order.

Have you checked your analytics recently to see how your store is tracking? If not, check out our beginners guide to reports and analytics here at this link!