Question

Are others seeing Failed and “Locked” Course Purchases??

  • 11 February 2022
  • 8 replies
  • 155 views

Userlevel 1

Hello Docebo Community!

We are using Authorize.Net as our payment gateway, and are repeatedly experiencing a problem that requires manual intervention.  I'd very interested to hear from the community if others are seeing something similar.

 

Or even better, I have my fingers crossed that someone has come up with a clean solution.  : )

 

We are have been escalated with Docebo support for quite some time, but they have not been able to provide any help yet.

 

Problem Description:

Case #1

- Courses added to the shopping cart get stuck in s "pending state"

- The end user cannot access the course

- The end user can't abort the transaction

- The end user can't perform a replacement purchase transaction

 

The end user is stuck.  They have to call us, we clear the transactions and have them resubmit.  Sometimes we have to repeat the process more than once.

 

Case #2

- All of #1… PLUS… Payment was processed and customer was charged.  (This results in even less pleasant phone conversations)

 

Case #3

- All of #2… PLUS.. Payment is charged, and  we show ONE pending transaction, and ANOTHER successful transaction.  (This should not be possible, because per the platform’s current rules, you can only purchase a course once)

 

We can’t see the root cause for the problem, since the logs between Docebo and Authorize.Net are not visible.  The best we have been able to do is recreate the "pending" condition through forced shopping cart abandonment.

 

For example:

1. put an in the shopping cart

2. close the browser

3. wait a period of time for the Docebo session to time out

4. the course becomes "stuck" in shopping cart, the user can’t void the purchase, and the user can’t take the class

 

Many, many thanks for any help that can be offered.

Cheers

Chris Jackson


8 replies

Userlevel 7
Badge +6

Wow what a stink-y story.

I am curious where this one lands ya. I am also curious….are you working with a Customer Success Manager? They should be able to guide you how to escalate with the Help Desk.

Userlevel 1

Thanks @dklinger .  We have been in escalation for quite a while, and it was Docebo support that suggested I post to the community to see if others are seeing the same problem, or have either avoided or fixed the problem.

I left this post out here for a bit just to see if anyone else showed up and said “Yeah, me too!  I hate this!”  LOL

The fact that you’re the only responder so far makes me wonder if we’re somehow “unique”.  (Boy… THAT makes me nervous)

 

Alternatively… maybe people are just busy and didn’t see this (likely)… or my choice of wording is just too boring. (ALSO likely.  LOL)

Userlevel 7
Badge +2

@chris.jackson 

I found another thread where someone was having a similar issue. One person in the thread details a middleware solution they’ve built to get around the pending transaction/stranded user issue. 

 

 

Our current workaround is via a webhook and an API call using Integromat for the integration.  Because the student could make a second or third purchase attempt that is successful, we do not try to automatically cancel the initial enrollment since that would remove them from a course they paid for.  Instead, we have an automated workflow that does the following:

  1. Receives the webhook from the LMS when a credit card purchase is made
  2. Waits 15 minutes for a CC transaction reference number to be recorded in the ecommerce module (usually sufficient to know if it really fails)
  3. Checks the transaction status after a 15 minute wait.  If no CC transaction info was recorded, the Docebo ecommerce transaction is automatically marked as cancelled with a note that this was an automatic cancellation
  4. Generates an email to the LMS admin mailbox to check if the student needs to be disenrolled.  If there is not a subsequent “paid” transaction for the course, the LMS admin manually disenrolls the student.


 

Userlevel 7
Badge +5

Woof, yeah that sounds rough! I’m looking at you, case 2. We use CyberSource and while I don’t think we had your exact use case, we did find that when entering the billing address the state had to be in a 2 character format. It’s an open text field so it wasn’t super obvious that it was a problem. Once we figured it out we edited the text to point that out. I don’t think that fixes everything for you, but might be one piece that helps along the resolution journey. 

Userlevel 1

Hello Chris,

We are using PayPal and Stripe and are facing the same payment problems that you describe. We have to run a report every week to identify and unenroll all buyers who ended up on the waiting list. Then we have to ask them to please try the payment again and often the next payment will succeed (don't ask me why). In the meantime, buyers end up in a no man's land, not being able to move forward or backward. 

I tried escalating this via our account manager but that did not go anywhere. Docebo points the finger at the payment provider and the payment provider points at Docebo. In the meantime, we are losing business. All very unsatisfactory. I have started looking around for another payment provider, one that does have a history of successful integration with Docebo. Have not found the holy grail yet, but I am open to suggestions ;-). 

Userlevel 2

Echoing others above, we have experienced much of the same (Authorize.net as our payment processor). It sure feels like the purchasing/ecommerce piece was an afterthought in Docebo’s development of their LMS, and it seems that internally they’re not yet sure even how to go about troubleshooting. And so customers and customer-service personnel are left to deal with it (not to mention lost revenue, bad PR from interrupted orders and disgruntled customers).

Ugh.

Would be neat if Docebo could fix this or at least provide guidance on how to work through.

Userlevel 1
Badge

@chris.jackson 

It’s been 3 months since you posed the original ask. I’m curious if you have a resolution now. We are using Authorize.net as well, and are facing these exact same issues. We have only had Docebo a short time, and this is already our #1 complain from users. 

Userlevel 1

I am thoroughly concerned about this situation and the A.Net payload not being able to support transactions as outlined. We are in the middle of “trying” to launch Docebo and this is not an area that I am happy with already. I am asking our developers to write custom API for the payload so we can avoid these types of situations. We don’t want our members to have a terrible experience in purchasing learning content. Docebo positioned itself as the best in payload integrations and I am not seeing that just in the beginning phases. Sad! 😰 Please keep me posted and I will also update as my developer moves forward.

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