If you received the message Delayed payment for discarded booking in your Bookeo Home page and /or email inbox, this article will explain why this happened and what you can do to avoid this problem.
In this article:
What does it mean?
When customers book online and are directed to PayPal to make the payment, sometimes they change their minds and abandon the payment process. To preserve resources, Bookeo discards the booking session if they do not make a payment within 30 minutes of being directed to PayPal. When that occurs, you receive this message.
This is a rare event, as Bookeo displays a clear warning message just below the Pay now button.
There are in fact 2 timeouts. Bookeo holds the slot/seat as reserved for 10 minutes, to give time to the customer to pay. It is important to put a limit on how long the slot/seat will be reserved, otherwise, customers that abandon payment would be able to block out your availability without making real bookings. See this article for more details
But even after the slot is released after 10 minutes, Bookeo will wait for a further 20 minutes (so 30 minutes in total) to see if the customer still makes the payment. In most cases the slot would still be available, so all is well.
After 30 minutes, Bookeo discards the booking session assuming that the customer has left PayPal without paying.
What to do next
As the customer has already paid, but no booking was created you can either:
-
Create the booking from your Bookeo calendar
The error message should give you the information you need, including the customer name, email address, service/class/tour/ date and time, and the number of participants. Please choose the tutorial for your Bookeo product on how to create a booking from your Bookeo calendar
Once you have created the booking you can record the earlier payment manually in the booking, as explained in this tutorial
-
Process a refund of the payment to the customer
You can use the tools provided by your payment gateway to process the refund. Please contact your payment gateway for assistance with this.
If you prefer, you can give the customer credit in their account that will be applied to the next booking the customer makes. You can find the tutorial on how to give credit to a customer here
How to avoid this problem?
Normally customers take a few minutes at max to pay via PayPal Payments Standard, especially because of the warning message above. Therefore it is rare for this message to appear. But if this occurs, Bookeo is still able to inform you, and lets you know so that you can manually arrange a booking or get in touch with the customer.
However, if you're concerned about this, consider using a full payment gateway, like Stripe or Square, where customers input their card number directly on the booking page. This is usually faster than PayPal Payments Standard.