NOTE If you haven't received a payment and you are seeing 'Pending Activation', this likely means that the customer did not complete the purchase. You can consider this as a cart abandonment and potentially reach out to these customers with a followup email to re-engage them.


Issue

When a customer signs up for a PayPal account the status of that account remains as 'Pending Activation' even when a payment is made successfully.


Solution

The first thing to confirm is that PayPal is configured correctly. 


If PayPal is configured correctly but the status still shows 'Pending Activation' after a successful sale, it's likely that IPN notifications are being blocked by some server level security. This can be proved by checking the PayPal IPN log.


  • Log into PayPal and go to the IPN History page. You should see the IPN relating to the purchase you just made at the top of the list with a status of Sent.

  • If the IPN doesn't show up in the list then check your IPN configuration and specifically ensure that you have IPNs enabled.

  • If the IPN shows up but the status is Failed then you'll want to reach out to your hosting provider to understand why IPNs from PayPal are being blocked

  • If the IPN in the PayPal IPN History log had a status of Sent, log into your WordPress/MemberMouse site and go to Logs > PayPal IPN Log. At (or near) the top of the list you should see the IPN logged from your test transaction.

  • If the IPN doesn't show up in the list then this means it was blocked by the server and never made it to MemberMouse. You'll want to reach out to your hosting provider to understand why IPNs from PayPal are being blocked.

  • If the IPN shows up but the associated account is still Pending Activation in MemberMouse, check your PayPal settings to make sure that the transaction's currency type is enabled by logging into PayPal and clicking the Currencies link under your account balance.  

  • If this does not resolve the issue, then you'll want to reach out to the MemberMouse customer success team for assistance. When you do this, please provide a screencast video that demonstrates you going through the steps listed here and WordPress admin credentials. You can use this free tool for shooting a screencast video: https://www.techsmith.com/jing-tool.html