Force Guests to Pay First then create an invoice

[bradybarrows]

Feature Suggestion: 

Force Guests to Pay First then create an invoice. 

Currently creating an invoice when checking out and not forcing a guest to pay creates a bogus invoice with no contact information. 

[Joey_M]

It does my head in the amount of invoices that are generated but actually aren't paid, I think this suggestion would eliminate the issue - especially when guests do it.

Serious buyers will put in their name/address etc

So, many guests don't even bother and there's no way to remind someone who doesn't leave any information - so what's the point in the generated invoice?

[Sonya*]

28 minutes ago, Joey_M said:

So, many guests don't even bother and there's no way to remind someone who doesn't leave any information - so what's the point in the generated invoice?

This is not about guests, but about how IPS is designed.

See the page: _https://irosacea.org/subscriptions/ When you click on one of the Subscribe now buttons, you will be redirected to the Checkout page. The URL of the Checkout page contains the invoice number in its URL, e. g. _https://irosacea.org/checkout/XXX/ and this invoice (XXX) is already created before you even start to fill out the Checkout form.

So it is not that users submit invoices without filling in the information. They will not be able to proceed without filling out the information. This is the IPS that creates the invoice as soon the page is just shown to the user. It is just too early. 

If a user is just curious about what happens after clicking on Subscribe now, the invoice is already generated for being curious. Theoretically, the bots can generate invoices as well. Just by crawling all URLs on the site.

Edited April 25, 2022 by Sonya*
Removed active links

[My Sharona]

On 4/24/2022 at 5:55 PM, bradybarrows said:

Feature Suggestion: 

Force Guests to Pay First then create an invoice. 

Currently creating an invoice when checking out and not forcing a guest to pay creates a bogus invoice with no contact information. 

The form given to someone who owes is called an invoice. The form given to someone who has paid is called a receipt.

Edited April 27, 2022 by My Sharona

[bradybarrows]

Thanks Joey_M, Sonya, and MySharona for your clarifications. Do you have any recommendations on how to force 'guests' or bots to go through something that forces them to put in an email address, name and address, to prevent creating this needless invoice?  A plugin? 

[bradybarrows]

This issue is still not resolved. I have to delete each invoice one at a time. Really irritating. No contact information so there is no way this is useful. In the next update can we resolve this issue? Or could you select as many pending invoices in the list and delete them all in one click?  That would resolve it for me. 

Nobody else has this issue?  If you don't have this issue, what do you do to resolve it?

 

Another caveat is that pending invoices turn into EXPIRED invoices. I have three pages of expired invoices submitted by guests who do not fill in the required information. None. Zip. Nada. I have to delete all this too since it just adds to the list of PAID members in the list. Three pages of bogus members. Not sure how IC thinks about these things. There must be a reason. 

I did notice that two members CANCELLED their subscriptions. I understand that concept. But a GUEST will not cancel a subscription since they don't go through the process to pay or fill in the contact info. It would be nice to figure out how to resolve this issue. 

Edited November 2, 2022 by bradybarrows

[opentype]

7 hours ago, bradybarrows said:

Nobody else has this issue?  … what do you do to resolve it?

Nothing. I just deal with paid invoices and ignore the rest. As mentioned in earlier discussions about this, I don’t understand why you say you “have to delete each invoice”. No one forces you to do that and there is very little to achieve with that. 

I also hope this will be addressed some day, but IPS will not say “let’s quickly fix that for the next release”. Reworking how the checkout works probably requires major structural changes to the Commerce app and they are not going to touch that until they also want to make major Commerce changes for other reasons. 

Edited November 2, 2022 by opentype

[ZLTRGO]

The simplest way would be to add an Option to Products that is smth like:
"Allow Guest to purchase?"

If it's on false it shows:
"You must sign in or register in order to purchase."
instead of the
"Add to Cart"

I have such plugin and tried to upload it on the marketplace 2x times but it got rejected because it's not their "conventional way of doing it correctly" or smth xD

Working without issues for me.

[Daddy]

We also get thousands of redundant invoices per week. Occasionally we'll get someone who spams it for whatever reason. I just set them to expire after 7 days and periodically delete them all in the database.

select * from nexus_invoices where i_status = 'expd'

 

[My Sharona]

If an invoice is not completed (purchased), it's 'Status' becomes "Expired" after a set period of time (set with the 'Invoice Flow' of the 'Invoice Settings'). Does anything really need to be done with it if it's status changes automatically? Additionally, nothing shows up in the 'Transactions' until an invoice has been paid.

I'm sure there are use cases where a need to have the ability to prevent guests from creating invoices though. Just my two cents here.

[bradl]

New club treasurers always contact me in a panic when they see the invoices.  I have to coach each new one to ignore Invoices and only be concerned about Transactions.

However, we have many computer-phobic club members who sometimes stumble trying to purchase something and *sometimes* I can sort of read the invoice trail and discern that they are actually trying to accomplish a purchase; for those members I feel OK reaching out to help them, but for the vast majority of dead-end invoices I just have no idea if someone was "just looking" or actually having trouble. 

[OptimusBain]

On 11/2/2022 at 1:36 AM, bradybarrows said:

This issue is still not resolved. I have to delete each invoice one at a time. Really irritating. No contact information so there is no way this is useful. In the next update can we resolve this issue? Or could you select as many pending invoices in the list and delete them all in one click?  That would resolve it for me. 

Nobody else has this issue?  If you don't have this issue, what do you do to resolve it?

 

Another caveat is that pending invoices turn into EXPIRED invoices. I have three pages of expired invoices submitted by guests who do not fill in the required information. None. Zip. Nada. I have to delete all this too since it just adds to the list of PAID members in the list. Three pages of bogus members. Not sure how IC thinks about these things. There must be a reason. 

I did notice that two members CANCELLED their subscriptions. I understand that concept. But a GUEST will not cancel a subscription since they don't go through the process to pay or fill in the contact info. It would be nice to figure out how to resolve this issue. 

I am having the same issue. I've suggested this change a few times. It's irritating. An invoice should only be generated if it has been paid, as simple as that. No payment= no invoice.

Unpaid attempta it ahould be another type  of document, not an invoice. Invoice numbers should be consecutive in my country for the same reason, unpaid = no invoice.

[opentype]

10 minutes ago, OptimusBain said:

An invoice should only be generated if it has been paid …

Not true. I have to keep correcting that. An invoice is NOT a payment receipt. An invoice is the manifestation of the legally binding sales contract. As such, it is tied to the moment of purchase. That occurs when the customers hits the final “buy now” button at the end of the checkout process. In fact, the invoice is the legally binding document to show what the customers owes. Before real-time online purchases, that was the main use of the invoice. “Here is what you ordered. Now pay within the time stated on the invoice …”. With real-time payments it’s not as obvious anymore, but with IPS Commerce one can still use the option “manual payment” for manual wire-transfer payments for example. This absolutely needs an invoice prior to the payment – for both the seller and the customer. 

[OptimusBain]

1 minute ago, opentype said:

Not true. I have to keep correcting that. An invoice is NOT a payment receipt. An invoice is the manifestation of the legally binding sales contract. As such, it is tied to the moment of purchase. That occurs when the customers hits the final “buy now” button at the end of the checkout process. In fact, the invoice is the legally binding document to show what the customers owes. Before real-time online purchases, that was the main use of the invoice. “Here is what you ordered. Now pay within the time stated on the invoice …”. With real-time payments it’s not as obvious anymore, but with IPS Commerce one can still use the option “manual payment” for manual wire-transfer payments for example. This absolutely needs an invoice prior to the payment – for both the seller and the customer. 

Yeah but in Spain an invoice that has not been paid isn't even called invoice. There is no legal binding sales UNTIL it has been paid. If not paid it's useless. And my ACP is flooded with useless attempts for that legal binding without addresses or anything that I need to keep on deleting day after day. 

[opentype]

Well, that’s a translation issue then. It doesn’t change the legality or process. Think of a waiter printing out the “bill”/“check” (whatever you might want to call or translate it) in a restaurant. That document is the “invoice”. It doesn’t matter if you have already paid it or not. It shows what you owe the restaurant. That is separate from the “receipt”, “credit card slip” and so on documenting the payment. An invoice for online sales can be both (proof of purchase, proof of payment), but it absolutely needs to be the former and as such exist independent from a payment. 

[OptimusBain]

20 hours ago, opentype said:

Well, that’s a translation issue then. It doesn’t change the legality or process. Think of a waiter printing out the “bill”/“check” (whatever you might want to call or translate it) in a restaurant. That document is the “invoice”. It doesn’t matter if you have already paid it or not. It shows what you owe the restaurant. That is separate from the “receipt”, “credit card slip” and so on documenting the payment. An invoice for online sales can be both (proof of purchase, proof of payment), but it absolutely needs to be the former and as such exist independent from a payment. 

I understood, but that ticket at the restaurant is called that, a ticket. It will become an invoice once it's been paid. At restaurants in Spain, and everywhere in my country, you will NEVER EVER EVER get an invoice if the bill has not been paid. 

So now, I have my ACP filled with useless tickets called invoices. And the government wants correlative invoices. Since I have to delete unpaid payment attempts, the final invoices that are paid will never have correlative numbers.

I assume each country does it slightly different, but as I said, an unpaid invoice is a ticket in my country. The invoice (called factura in my country), will not even exist otherwise.

Ans that's why I aggree with this feature proposal that a guest should pay first befor the invoice is even created.

Edited November 11, 2022 by OptimusBain

[opentype]

We are going around in circles. You are not matching the translations properly. And when you then write in English, what you say is simply not true. But let’s just get out of that circle and just ignore the words for a moment. They are just labels. We are talking about the process of an online sale. That’s what matters. 

And that “document”, that IPS creates when a checkout is started need to exist when the order is submitted and—depending on the payment method—this means potentially BEFORE the payment is being made. That’s a fact. Please stop saying otherwise just because of your mistranslation of the English words being used. The customer needs a document to see what is being owed to the seller when they pay manually (e.g. via check or wire-transfer). The seller needs a document to demonstrate what the customer legally owes as payment. By asking for the “invoice” to be postponed until after the payment, you are asking for a legally required document to be removed from the process. And that’s why you are wrong when you say it like you do in English. It’s not a matter of opinion or country law. It’s just what invoice means in English. 

Proof 1:

pay attention to “payment at later time”. 

Proof 2:

pay attention to “sum due”, e.g. “still needs to be paid”. 

You are clearly not using that definition and therefore everything you say in English is wrong and your feature request becomes unreasonable as well. 

If those things don’t match your local translation, what needs to change would be your language strings. But please stop asking for the process to change (invoice after vs. before the payment), when it is legally required around the world. 

The only thing that actually should change eventually is that the invoice gets postponed from the start of the checkout to the end of the checkout. 

Edited November 11, 2022 by opentype

[PatrickRQ]

I noticed, while purchasing locally, that large companies have different mechanism, which may be important in case of VAT invoices

VAT invoices must always be in order and none can be skipped. That means the issued and not paid VAT invoice must be cancelled by invoice correction - that already generates huge accounting costs for cases there is many documents. Not paid and not cancelled VAT invoice would have to paid to Tax Office by the seller in amount of the VAT specified on the invoice.

Now, about the mechanism I noticed. Buyer pays the receipt / proforma but only after completed payment he get displayed/emailed real/final VAT invoice.

Having something similar in IPS Commerce would be great.

Edited November 14, 2022 by PatrickRQ

[bradybarrows]

This issue is still going on. Guests can create an invoice with absolutely no contact info. This floods my invoices with PENDING invoices which have to be deleted (see screenshot).

Since we can't force guests to pay first before an invoice is made, in a future upgrade could IC please allow multiple invoices to be deleted, i.e., a check box that selects all the invoices for a page and then delete them all? I have two pages of invoices that have to be deleted one at a time, and having this feature would make it a bit easier to delete them all. 

Also the ability to delete multiple EXPIRED subscriptions guests create that flood that category and need to be deleted. These bogus invoices are just a nuisance. 

Edited December 21, 2023 by bradybarrows

[Jim M]

1 hour ago, bradybarrows said:

This issue is still going on.

To be fair here, this isn't rather an issue/bug but rather how the software is intended to work. While I understand you want to see this changed, I do want to set expectations here and point out that this isn't like fixing some small-time bug, edit two lines of code and we're done. It's a fairly large design change to Commerce and functionality of all who use Commerce. With that in mind, this is not something that will more than likely happen in version 4. The future is still out on changes here so can keep your eyes open but I would not set your heart one way or another 🙂 .

[opentype]

7 hours ago, bradybarrows said:

which have to be deleted

no, they don’t.