How to automatically cancel pending orders after a specified amount of time?

Question

We found that we sometimes run out of stock/inventory due to orders pending payment. In our case, when the customer cancels PayPal payment, or doesn't pay through Bank Deposit.

Is there a way to "release" those stock/inventory after a specified amount of time, automatically, without us having to check regularly for orders pending payment and cancelling manually?

We realize there are extensions that do this, but was wondering if there's a built-in way in Magento to do it.

Answer 1

I would not delete the order but just cancel them and with a cronjob (either a script or Magento extension) you can do this. Run it daily to clean up the orders. Results are logged to var/logs/cancelorders.log for reference.

$collection = Mage::getModel('sales/order')->getCollection()
    ->addFieldToFilter('updated_at', Mage::getModel('core/date')->gmtDate(null, time()-86400)) // only clean yesterdays orders so user has time to restart transaction
    ->addFieldToFilter('state', 'pending_payment');

foreach ($collection as $order)
{
   $order->cancel();
   $order->setStatus('canceled');
   try {
      $order->save();
      Mage::log("Canceled {$order->getIncrementId()}", Zend_Log::INFO, 'cancelorders.log', true);
   } catch(Exception $e){
      Mage::log("Could not cancel order {$order->getIncrementId()}: {$e}", Zend_Log::WARN, 'cancelorders.log', true);
   }
}

Answer 2

There is no built in way of doing this. You can simply create a cron that calls the following code (or something similar).

$olderThan = 21;//21 days
$date = date('Y-m-d', mktime(0,0,0, date('m'), date('d') - $olderThan, date('Y')));
//get orders with no update in the last 21 days
$orders = Mage::getModel('sales/order')->getCollection()
    ->addFieldToFilter('state', 'pending_payment')
    ->addFieldToFilter('updated_at', array('lt'=>$date)); //you can use created_at instead of updated_at.
foreach ($orders as $order){
    $order->cancel();
    $order->save();
}

Answer 3

I also read a Magento tutorial about this issue on Inchoo.net

You can get some useful instructions from it:

http://inchoo.net/magento/cancel-pending-orders/