Why can't my students buy my course?

This article covers possible error messages and common reasons for failed payments that students may see when trying to complete their payment at checkout.

Reasons for Incomplete or Failed Payments

There are 3 possible scenarios where a payment will fail:

Issue with the student's payment method - like insufficient funds or their bank blocked the purchase for security reasons.
Issue with the payment processor - this would be in the situation that Stripe or Paypal are having issues completing payments. You can check directly on their status pages below to see if they had any outages when your student reported an unsuccessful purchase:
Stripe Status Page
Paypal Status Page

Issue with Thinkific completing the order - this does occur rarely and in this case, it's best to reach out to our Support team so that we can investigate the issue, and complete the order for your student.

Possible Error Codes

The messages below are possible errors that students may see on the checkout page while trying to complete their purchase. These error messages will display inline on the checkout form like below:

The transaction was declined. Please try again.

Issue: There was an issue processing the transaction and no payment was taken.

Next step: The student should try purchasing again.

The transaction was declined. Please contact the site administrator.

Issue: There is an issue with the your connected Stripe or Paypal account and no payment was taken.

Next step: The student should not try purchasing again. With Paypal, your students may experience the Paypal checkout modal opening and closing quickly. In this case, you want to check if there are any restricted placed on your Paypal account.

As the site owner, you should review your Stripe or Paypal account to see if there any restrictions placed on your account or contact our Support team for further troubleshooting.

The payment was declined. Please contact your bank and try again.

Issue: There is an issue with the student's method of payment they are using and we are unable to process the payment.

Next step: The student should contact their bank before trying again, or use a different card.

The payment was received but your order was not completed. Please contact the site administrator.

Issue: Payment was taken from the student, but the order was not completed in Thinkific.

Next step: Please contact our Support team with the following information:

Email of the student
Name of the product (course/bundle) they purchased
Date of payment
Total amount paid
Method of payment (Stripe or Paypal)

Secure authentication couldn’t be completed. Please try again.

Issue: The student provided the incorrect credentials to complete secure authentication for their payment method.

Next step: The student should try again and ensure they entered the correct credentials to complete secure authentication. For more information on secure authentication and when it's required, please see here.

This order has already been completed. Redirecting you to the thank you page.

Issue: The student has inputted their credit card information on the checkout page and payment has been taken but were not redirected to the thank you page. If they try and click the 'purchase' button again on the checkout form, they will see this error and be redirected to the thank you page.

Next step: Since payment was already taken, our system will recognize this and redirect them to the thank you page where the order and enrollment will be processed on Thinkific. Your student will not be charged again and they will be able to access the products they purchased. No further action is required from you or your student.

An error occurred while processing your order through Paypal.

Issue: There is something blocking the Paypal checkout from running properly.

Next step: Ask the student to review and disable any browser extensions or plug-ins installed that may block script from running and try purchasing again. If this doesn't fix the issue, please contact our Support team.

Pre-Checkout Errors

The messages below are possible errors that students may see before loading the checkout page on Thinkific. These errors will show as a red, flash notification at the top of the landing page.

Checkout could not be loaded. Please try again.

Issue: We were unable to load the checkout page for student to complete the purchase.

Next step: The student should try purchasing again.

Please contact us to enroll.

Issue: The student attempts to go to checkout but are redirected back to the course landing page.

Next step: Your course is likely set to private meaning that students are unable to enroll by purchasing the course from your site. You will want to remove the private setting from the course so that students can complete the checkout and enrollment process on their own.

You are already enrolled in {course/bundle name}.

Issue: The student attempts to go to checkout for a course or bundle they are already enrolled in.

Next step: We prevent students from purchasing the same course or bundle if they still have an active enrollment. If a student missed a payment on a subscription or payment plan, they should update their credit card from their account page to prompt the billing system to retry the payment.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns about why a student was unable to purchase a product from your Thinkific site, just reach out to our Support team directly to help troubleshoot!

Troubleshooting Guide for Student Issues

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