WHMCS creates inactive (invalid?) users upon failed order

[KnauerBauer]

Hello,

I was facing a very annoying issue where customers were unable to complete their orders due to an error 500 - server timeout. I found out that the issue was caused by the netim template. However, while troubleshooting this, I noticed a very undesired behavior by WHMCS.

When as customer tries to submit an order, and it fails for any reason - e.g. the payment fails, or the e-mail already exists, it fails with "A user already exists with that email address". While checking the clients/user lists, I could not find the user. Then I noticed that WHMCS creates a user under /admin/user/list for every failed order. This leads to a situation where the E-Mail address of the customer gets blocked for further attempts, and they need to select a different E-Mail upon retry. The weird thing is that the user does not receive a confirmation mail where they could validate their account. So, for every failed order attempt, the user would need to provide a new mail address. This is a very unreasonable behavior.

In addition, I am surprised that WHMCS checks the email address only AFTER the payment. So the customer fills out the form, performs the payment (which may fail or whatever), and then gets told that the e-mail is already in the system. This is a huge abandonment generator. 

 

Do you have any suggestions on how to circumvent this behavior, which is a total UX disaster?

 

Thank you.

[KnauerBauer]

For whom it may concern, this issue was caused by an underlying timeout on the WHMCS side. Once this problem was resolved, this issue was resolved too. Seems like the cart.php was only executed partly, leading to this mess.