A “Pending” order is an order that is NOT Completed. These orders can NOT be cancelled and will appear in your order history, but not in reports. A Pending order can occur when an order is initiated in the POS system and there is an interruption in the device connectivity during the transaction. Interruptions that can occur when the Vin65 app or the device crashes, connectivity is lost between the winery and Vin65 or Vin65 and the gateway or a combination of these issues.
The causes of these interruptions can include:
Moving beyond the range of your access point while using your mobile device
Leaving the app open for an extended period of time and then trying to complete the transaction
Overuse of your network or using the same access point for a guest network
Completing a transaction that is open on another device
Completing a transaction that has already been closed on another device
Changes to your local network settings while conducting business
Localized ISP outages
Vin65 service interruptions
When the connectivity interruption occurs, users will report a “spinning wheel” or timeout when trying to Complete an order. When an order is successfully Completed you will see the 'order is complete’ screen with a green checkmark (pictured below)
When you experience errors on a POS on a mobile device here are some areas to troubleshoot:
Check that you have a strong and consistent connection to the internet on your device by viewing the WiFi status icon
Make sure that you are operating within the range of you WiFi Access Point (know the distance limits from your AP)
If dropouts occur when you transfer from WiFi Boosters, Repeaters or Extenders consider consolidating access points (packet loss can occur even with an aggressive handoff when transitioning from one AP to the next)
Be mindful of obstructions such as large metal objects or interference from household appliances that can cause “dead zones”. (A great resource to help determine “dead zones” is netspot.com.)
If you access the internet via wireless antenna or satellite dish, be aware of high winds can interrupt your connection
Increase your internet speed or disable your guest network to avoid overuse
My winery success story
Pending orders were a daily occurrence at my winery and resulted in frustrated staff, upset customers and occasional loss of revenue. We were using a WiFi router placed in our office rather than our tasting room, it was near other devices that caused interference and there was an industrial refrigerator in between the rooms obstructing the signal. We first tried using a WiFi extender in the hopes that we would have better coverage and work around the obstructions. Unfortunately, this caused more issues because interruptions occurred (packets were dropped) during the transition from the main router to the extender resulting in even more pending orders.
The next step we tried was using a single, strong, centrally placed router in the tasting room and disabled all connections to other WiFi signals on the property. Making these changes solved our problem overnight. The centrally placed router eliminated interference from obstructions and the single eliminated dropouts when moving around the tasting area. I could not have solved this problem without the help of an IT professional. I strongly recommend that if you consult an IT team to help isolate the source of your issues and provide you with the best solution for your winery.
Seriously, an application that completely fails due to small packet loss is bad engineering. Vin65 has the expertise and resources to implement some sort of resolution measure, they just choose not to.
The title: “How to eliminate Pending orders on the POS.” Did you get any assemblance of an answer in the response? I noticed a change in the title but then a copy and paste for the response. We just changed our Merchant Services and the system tried , but did NOT run, all the old "pending"and “declined” orders. Had they gone through who would be responsible for contacting all the unjustly charged individuals? Would it make sense to be able to delete these incomplete transactions? Let’s see if we get an answer or another redirect…
I agree, that this is not a network related issue, and is related to how the application is built. I had a POS order created just fine, and then I noticed there was another “pending order” for the exact negative amount with 4 line items, 2 zero quantity and 2 negative quantity based upon the previous order. I don’t even know how that was created. This is a defect and it’s truly troublesome. I truly intend this as a constructive feedback comment and I’ll be happy to help with a resolution to this issue.
Vin65 should look at Square’s app. It’s not so sensitive to packet-loss that it requires a persistently perfect network to function without imploding.
I appreciate the effort from @bobby, but if your product requires linking to obscure Steam community guides from 2014 to work properly, it is broken.
The response from Vin65 has been, frankly, tone-deaf. Most of your clients are small-to-medium size wineries. Their expertise isn’t prioritizing CSGO on their router, it’s making world-class wines and crafting compelling stories around them. Our company has the resources, have troubleshot this several times, and yet, it lingers.
Vin65 has always democratized the sophisticated, expensive tools that large companies use to allow smaller wineries to Sell More Wine™. So how about this, Vin65, you guys shoulder the network turbulence burden. Build better packet loss resilience and recovery, improve your notifications. The rest of us will help you figure out what’s wrong, but you have to be open to the idea that it’s you and not us.
We do realize that there is room for improvement on our end to help eliminate the pending order/lockup issue as well, and this is an area that our development team is actively working to improve.
However, the app freezing up is a symptom with more than one potential cause. The information in this thread has successfully been used by some wineries to drastically reduce the number of pending/paid orders they are receiving so we felt it was important to share our observations with the community if it could help even a few more clients.
If Vin65 is going to insist on such stringent network requirements, you need to document the performance thresholds and applicable router settings on your website. That’s what VoIP providers do, which is another technology delicately sensitive to packet loss.
The problem is some orders that show as pending have had money collected, but the order isn’t going to be reported. If money is collected an order shouldn’t get the status pending.
Independent of the current condition of the network.
To put in another perspective, we ran our tasting room using Microsoft Dynamics RMS as our POS for several years, with PCcharge as our credit card interface. We were on the same T1 connection we are now. Charge anomalies were rare, maybe once every three months, in the form of a double charge. We would check for these every night as part of our closing procedure - just scan the list in PCcharge - before settling the batch.
In fact, back then our T1 network was asked to do more - the entire company shared that one T1 connection, with several employees doing email, listening to music, etc.
Now - on the same T1 connection, which is now dedicated exclusively to Vin65 - we have a much higher anomaly rate. We shouldn’t.
If you have orders that show as pending and you confirm that payment has been transmitted through the gateway, it is likely that the connection disruption happened before the payment information could return to Vin65 which prevents the order. When these errors occur, please submit a support ticket with the order number and a brief description of the issue and we can assist you with adjusting the status of your order.
So - if I understand correctly - as a matter of daily procedure - we should review ALL Pending POS orders against the gateway to check for errors. That’s what you are suggesting?
That’s indeed what we ended up doing as we consistently were not able to reconcile Vin65 against the Merchant. Reviewing the pending orders resolves 90% of the discrepancies. Do we like doing this? Absolutely not! Do we let those considering joining Vin65 know, yes we do.
If Vin65 has so many issues due to lost packets, I don’t understand why it focuses so on Ipad technology. Ipad are one of the few devices that do not accept a hard wired ethernet connection and are notorious for fluttering wireless connections.
We are now looking into migrating to some sort of a hard wired ethernet connected device, like a desk or laptop with a touchscreen.
