Why is a paypal payment stuck on "pending" status?

For PayPal transactions, you can receive an intermediate result code indicating the payment has not reached a final state yet. This happens when a payment is completed but the final status of the payment cannot be obtained, or for flows where it takes a while before the shopper can complete the payment. For more information on all possible PayPal resultCodes, please see our documentation here. 

This Pending status can be the result of a number of different scenarios and is quite common. Your integration should be able to handle the Pending or Received resultCodes and rely on notifications to obtain the final authorized status. 

Until the Authorisation is confirmed by PayPal, and the AUTHORISATION notification is communicated to your webhook, the Pending transactions will be displayed in the Customer Area > Transactions > Offers section as an Open Offer until it expires.

After a PayPal payment is in pending status, Adyen submits status checks every 15 minutes for 1 hour and when an authorized response is returned we send the AUTHORIZATION notification to you. If there is no further authorization response returned, the transaction will remain in the offer stage until it expires.

Most common reasons the payment is in pending status:

• Shopper needs to take further action to complete the payment
• Incorrect PayPal email (MID) configured at the payment method
• Incorrect or missing currency on payment

Troubleshooting:

• Notify your shopper that additional action is needed on their end to complete the payment
• Ensure you are using the correct PayPal Business account (not personal account) when communicating with Adyen on initial setup
• Ensure you have the same currency in which you are processing configured on the payment method