Feature Request: Partial Event Registrations (like abandoned carts)

Question

Is it within the realm of possibility to have CiviCRM create a record of an authenticated users registration after they hit submit (before completing payment)? It would be awesome to use this to see what someone selected and judge why they did not complete payment. Sometimes, a user will have a payment error and quit through frustration (card decline, address mismatch, etc.) or spontaneously have to stop their registration (need to go, kid crying, etc.). It would be awesome if they could pick up their previous session and complete it.

Additionally, sometimes we encounter strange errors on CiviEvent registrations that I am having a hard time finding in the debug logs. It would be great if the partial registration could also have any errors attached to it somehow.

If this was enabled, extensions could also offer exit-detection and offer discounts to continue with a registration, or follow-up emails to complete it.

Thank you for your ideas and thoughts.

Answer 1

It depends on the scale of the partial registrations you have, but I don't think you need any additional functionality. We get a small number and I think they are best followed up manually. All of them have been people failing to complete the transaction in PayPal. One was them was someone who fell asleep (!) and the rest were people uncomfortable with anything online and not understanding PayPal and a friendly personal email was the right thing where an automated message would probably have not helped.

You can Find Participants with status "Pending (incomplete transaction)". Also I think you need to do it manually so that you can see if they tried again soon afterwards and were successful, which has often been the case.