Guest Cannot Check Out When Donating

[JohnCourt]

Good day folks, I hope you can help me. We are doing a fundraiser in our community, logged in members are successfully donating and being redirected to PayPal and payments are successful, but when a Guest tried to donate, this is the error message we get, any help or direction is greatly appreciated 🙂 

[Gary]

Hi @JohnCourt,

Log into your AdminCP -> Commerce -> Payments -> Settings -> Check Out

At the top of the page, do you have all of those items enabled? As per the description below these settings, if you disable any of these options beware that without a billing address:

• Some payment methods will not be able to be used, including PayPal for card payments, 2CheckOut and some Authorize.Net processors. Any payment methods which are set to only be available to certain countries will not be available.
• If any tax rates use a rate that is dependent on the customer's location, the default tax rate will be used.
• Any Anti-Fraud Rules which act on the customer's billing address will assume the customer is not in the country specified by them.
• If MaxMind integration is enabled, it's ability to accurately detect fraud will be impeded.

It is recommended if you use any of these features that you leave all options checked so customers are always asked for a billing address.

Failing that, scroll to the bottom of the page. Do you know if any of the guests making donations are having their payments declined? Are you certain these donations are legitimate? Have you attempted to donate as a guest yourself to see if the process works correctly?

[JohnCourt]

Thanks Gary, all the above is set up appropriately, and the error still persists.

Also MaxMind is disabled.

I have attempted to donate as a guest and I cannot get to the payment. If you'd like to please try it yourself. Go to this topic and click on the Donate graphic, you'll then be taken to the donation page. Don't worry when my issue gets fixed I'll back track here and delete the link. Not trying to get donations here.

****link removed****

There is also another issue that I just noticed. I have enabled "Current Donation Goals" box at the upper right of this page:

****link removed****

 

As a guest you cannot click on it. As a logged in user you can click on it and it will open up the donation page. Please try it. Thanks for any help Gary.

 

[JohnCourt]

By the way Gary, to answer your question about Guests being declined, I don't think that is a problem since they can't access the payment UI.

Edited June 25 by JohnCourt

[Gary]

Guests cannot donate unless they have signed up to your community. I found another topic created by someone experiencing the same issue in September 2023, where it was advised that guests do not have the ability to donate unless they create an account on your community through the checkout process.

Clicking the donation in the Donation Goals block also doesn't work for me as a guest, but testing it on my community, it is clickable when logged in. Safe to say it is due to the above as well.

Edited June 25 by Gary

[Marc]

This is intentional on the system. Guests cannot use the donate system. They have to be logged in

[JohnCourt]

I appreciate the help and looking into it guys.

I am not sure why that would be intentional, that sure narrows down our fundraising efforts. Specially since our community is fairly small, and as a guest who most likely does not want to create "another account" that they'll probably never use, I am afraid is asking too much of a guest to make a donation for the cause. While our community is on the surface about woodworking and crafts, our main cause is supporting our veterans, so what we have are folks who may not be woodworkers, and don't want to be a part of our community, but they would love to support our veterans and donate to us to help us help our causes.

Is this something that happened in the past couple years? Because somehow in the past, we have had guests donate. I know that has happened because I have friends at work who have donated in the past and they are not members.

Thanks for your efforts gents. 🙂 

Reading the topic linked above, a brute force attack is the reason, what happens when this happens? Thinking about the donation by members only feature, I have used guest check out on sites before, I don't think I've ever been forced to create an account to check out from any retail site.

Edited June 25 by JohnCourt

[JohnCourt]

Thinking about a workaround, I suppose I could just create a PayPal button and use it for donations.

[Gary]

33 minutes ago, JohnCourt said:

Thinking about a workaround, I suppose I could just create a PayPal button and use it for donations.

That’s exactly what I was going to suggest, and will work just as well for your community. 😉

[JohnCourt]

15 minutes ago, Gary said:

That’s exactly what I was going to suggest, and will work just as well for your community. 😉

Thanks Gary, but at the same time, can anyone tell me why we can't make this happen? With all the expertise and knowledge the devs here have, is there anyway we can make the native feature usable for guests without having to become a member? Like I stated, we can go anywhere and purchase items as a guest on virtually any retailers site on the www without jumping through hoops to become a logged in customer.

 

[Marc]

1 hour ago, JohnCourt said:

I am not sure why that would be intentional, that sure narrows down our fundraising efforts. Specially since our community is fairly small, and as a guest who most likely does not want to create "another account" that they'll probably never use, I am afraid is asking too much of a guest to make a donation for the cause. While our community is on the surface about woodworking and crafts, our main cause is supporting our veterans, so what we have are folks who may not be woodworkers, and don't want to be a part of our community, but they would love to support our veterans and donate to us to help us help our causes.

Is this something that happened in the past couple years? Because somehow in the past, we have had guests donate. I know that has happened because I have friends at work who have donated in the past and they are not members.

This is because it was being used as a target for spammers to test stolen credit card details. 

[JohnCourt]

58 minutes ago, Marc Stridgen said:

This is because it was being used as a target for spammers to test stolen credit card details. 

Ya gotta pardon my ignorance Marc, but couldn't they do that as logged in members if they are that nefarious?

By the way guys, if you'd like, you can delete the links to my website above, thanks 🙂

Edited June 25 by JohnCourt

[Marc]

They could, however in the same way guests could spam your site and so could members. You can simply ban a member. Guests will just keep coming

[Gary]

8 hours ago, JohnCourt said:

Ya gotta pardon my ignorance Marc, but couldn't they do that as logged in members if they are that nefarious?

It takes a lot more manual effort to register accounts and test stolen credit cards as Marc suggested. It's just another way of mitigating this type of illegal activity as much as possible.

[JohnCourt]

Hey guys, so how do my guest even get to the page to make a donation, then to be prompted to sign up and check out? Do they have to join up first? Because at this point they just get an error message.

[Gary]

When a guest attempts to donate, they will be able to register an account through the checkout process. They don't have to register an account first, then click the donate button to follow the prompts if you know what I mean.

Can you confirm you are running the latest version and have no plugins or custom apps installed that may be interfering?

[Marc]

They would have to click to register at the top of the page as normal. There is no other way around this at present

[JohnCourt]

Marc, I think this is a challenging flow for guest donors. And also a bit confusing for Admins at the checkout settings because in checkout settings there is a "Guest Checking Out" area.

So really there is no Guest Checkout, if you have to become a member to check out you are no longer a guest. I was just settling in with the idea that at least as Gary stated the guest would be prompted to create an account at checkout, but as we know now there is no way for the guest to get to that point of checkout unless you provide a manual link to the donation page, and even if they get that far they still can't checkout as Gary thought they should be able to do.

I think where my mind was stuck is since there is a "Guests Checking Out" settings then a guest should be able to access the checkout without logging in.

So this creates another problem, how do the guests know they have to log in in order to check out? They cannot access the donation page through the Donation Goals block, so I guess we'd have to somewhere install a visible message stating "Guests, if you wish to donate to our fundraiser, please create an account".

It's really a shame the bad guys of the world (brute force attacker credit card scammer pieces of sh#t) ruin if for us regular people. Kind of a microcosm of the way our society has become right? The innocent get screwed for the actions of the bad.

Anyway, beside the workflow being a challenge for non members to donate to our fundraiser (thus really nobody outside of the community will donate because it's such a hassle), I feel the admin area of Payment Settings/Checkout could use some tune up as far as getting rid of "Guests Checking Out". I feel it's confusing, it should probably just be eliminated?

[JohnCourt]

9 hours ago, Gary said:

Can you confirm you are running the latest version and have no plugins or custom apps installed that may be interfering?

One of the first things I did Gary, disable plugins and non native apps, and my version is up to date, but as stated above I think it's not possible at all anyway.