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Over the years, I’ve been asked many times what exactly PayPal Standard offers and how it works.  Basically, once you’ve gone to Store Settings > Payment Prefs in your Administration Panel and setup PayPal Standard (by at least adding your payment email address and checking the box accepting PayPal Standard Payments before clicking Submit at the bottom of the page) your store will be accepting payments through a slightly different process than your normal payment processor.  What happens is as follows:

Until the Billing Options portion of checkout, the process is the same as normal (the user adds item(s) to their cart, clicks checkout, either signs in, creates an account or progresses as an anonymous client if you have that option).  The user selects PayPal as the payment option and proceeds, again as normal, until the invoice summary page.  Here it splits again.  The user will be take from that page directly to PayPal’s website where they normally would have been taken to a final page saying the order was complete.  At this moment, an order is created in ProStores in order to preserve accurate inventory in the event that someone else attempts to checkout with the same item (assuming the user checking out through PayPal is buying the last of something) before the PayPal user has completed their purchase.  This order is placed in Orders > Pending Orders > Auth – Other in your ProStores Administration Panel.  It is considered pending because of the different outcomes that could result from here forward.

The first possibility is that the user completes the order.  If this occurs, the user is directed back to your site where they see your standard Order Confirmation page.  Then, depending on whether the product is physical or downloadable, the order is either moved to Orders > Ready For Shipping or Orders > Completed Orders respectively.  This is because a fully paid downloadable order (if you sell online products that do not require physical inventory) does not need to be shipped and can thus be considered fully complete.  The final shipping email is automatically sent at this time as well (shipping emails and downloadable products are both part of an Avanced Edition store or above only).

The second possibility is that the order is abandoned at this point.  This causes confusion with some merchants because there appears to have been a problem.  They have an order in Orders > Pending Orders > Auth – Other, but have never been paid for it.  Generally you should delete these orders about a week after they’ve been created (sooner if you need to keep that inventory available because you would otherwise sell out) because that means the user has either put it on hold or abandoned it entirely.  This can happen for many reasons, the most popular being that the user did not realize that they did not have the funds available through their PayPal account that they were expecting.

The final possibility is that the user can actually cancel the order entirely.  There is a link in the lower left of every screen once the user has been transferred to PayPal that states “Cancel and return to STORENAME” where STORENAME is the name you’ve setup as your store’s name under Store Settings > General.  This will send the user back to your store where they get a message informing them that the order has been canceled.  This will automatically delete the order from your store (permanently).  This also causes confusion with merchants because they see the initial invoice email (if they have their store set to copy staff on order confirmation emails), but then can never find the order in their store so they assume something went wrong.  Again this is most often caused by the client realizing once they get to PayPal’s website that they cannot afford the purchase at the time so they will manually cancel the order (instead of abandoning it as in the second example).