Over the last week I have had 3 orders where the user chooses to purchase using PayPal and I never receive payment. I email the customers to remind them to go to PayPal to pay but I get a response telling me that they went and bought it somewhere else because they had some type of problem. Has anyone else been having this problem? I am turning off PayPal for now since I finally got my merchant account. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Troy

I am not sure what is going on with the PayPal.

I just received a PayPal payment with no problem today!

I sometimes believe its because they are hitting the wrong button, or just don't understand how it works!!

My suggestion would to be place in the description on the PayPal Payment area a brief explanation if they have any problems please notify you preferably by phone or something like that!

Other than that I am not sure whats going on!

Troy, this is the downfall to paypal. The customer has to leave you site, go to paypal and then come back to your site to complete the order. A lot of customers will bail out when they get to the paypal site, its just human nature. We receive a lot of paypal orders in which we receive the funds but they didn't go back to our site and complete. You will have orders in which you receive the funds but they still didn't complete the order by coming back to your site, so be careful with that.

I have been having a problem with Paypal as well. I was getting people trying to put their email addresses in the Paypal spot even though they were paying with a credit card, then the order came through looking like they were paying by Paypal and all of the customer's credit card information dropped off.

Now, I don't know what is going on. Customer's orders are coming through multiple times with the first in red like it's going to paypal, and the next two or three without any payment information, order information, nothing.

I submitted a ticket and Steph said it was because customers are hitting the back button when they have already submitted payment. But, I took Paypal off and orders were going through okay. I had a customer request to pay by Paypal, so I put it back on and that customer's order went through okay, but the next customer had the weird multiple order thing happen again.

I have taken Paypal off and put a blurb on my website that this payment option is temporarily unavailable until tech support can figure out what is happening.

Thanks for the feedback, I have also taken PayPal offline for now and I will try it later when I am more confident in the way it works. I was getting the 3 orders (1 red) also.

Troy

We'll invesitage the PayPal situation. I have not heard of this before. Steph is correct in that if they go to PayPal, and change their mind (or for what ever reason) hit the back button after going to PayPal, it will create this empty order.

If your customers were trying to put the email address in the PayPal spot, then that is why the credit card info fell off. It was processing the order as PayPal rather then credit card, so it kept that info. In fact, that makes pretty good sense if your customer accidentally started going through with PayPal when they really wanted to use their credit card, and then hit back to select the correct payment method, and the order gets duplicated, with no product info.

Andy, I thought that the paypal problem where customer's were able to put both information in the credit card section AND their email address in the paypal section was fixed with the last patch?!?

Maybe you tried the fix, but then something else has happened to cause the weird duplicate orders?

Just speculating...

Why not have paypal open in a separate window.
This way there is no back button to hit.
And they are still in your site in the first window.

Just a thought.


-Charles

Charles I like this idea. Also if there could be a message at the top of the new window alerting the customer that they are now proceeding with a checkout using PayPal. I think this would cut down on some of the confusion.

Troy

That's not a bad idea. We'll take a look and weigh out the pluses and minuses and move forward accordingly. Thanks!

We are experiencing this same problem on a pretty regular basis. Folks enter their CC info and then put in their email address, which switches the radio button back to PayPal automatically. We get a few orders like this a week, on average, and have to contact the customer and tell them to re-submit payment, which is never a fun thing to do as they think they already paid. It seems that the best method to fix this would be to have the CC info fields with a "next" button if they want to pay via CC and have the PayPal option be a link to a new page where they can enter their email address instead if they want to pay by PayPal.

Another cause could be that a lot of folks use Gator, which doesn't differentiate between the CC fields and the PayPal field. It just sees "credit card" and "email address" so it automatically plugs in the CC info and then the email address, which switches the radio button down to PayPal.

Anyway, likewise we are going to remove PayPal until there is a workaround. When and if you do come up with one, please post here so we are aware of it and can add PayPal back in.

Thanks!

Why can't the email address in the Paypal spot be ignored if customer's have clicked on the radio button for credit cards/filled in credit card info? Why is the order thinking that just because the email address is filled in that the rest of the information is no longer valid? It's almost like if the email address is filled in, it is the default and everything else is wiped out.

Any word on when this will be corrected?

I have at least one or two customers a day calling to complain that they want to pay by credit card but are being taken to paypal ("against their will" someone told me - ha!).

Graying out the other options when the customer selects the radio button would be a great solution, as would ignoring the email address in the paypal box if the radio button for credit card payment is selected.

I now have my merchant account set up.
I have credit cards and paypal turned on.
I see the problem people are talking about with the email field.

I have a work around that seems to be ok until something is changed on this.

In the payment manager, the payment type and description fields accept html codes.
In payment types I put a <b> to bold the type and a </b> to end the bold.
My paypal description reads like this: "Balance transfer, credit card, or e-check. <BR><B>EMAIL ADDRESS for PAYPAL ONLY. </b> Do not enter email for V/MC above."

Using the bold types and a little html it really separates the fields.
Less change of people messing this up now.

Check it out on my site if you wish. You can select an item (scroll to the bottom of the home page and select the keyboard, that item wont mess up my inventory.
Click the buy and go through the checkout until the payment page and you can see it. After you are done please remember to clear/empty your cart.

Chammer-

Yes, that is a good idea to lend out to the other people having this issue. I would definitely make a good distinction between the two.

We actually added the auto-select of the radio button intentionally because too many people were actually forgetting to click any radio button, as funny as that may sound. So this was a new feature brought into v4.0.

It could be a new feature down the road to actually have an option of what to do (auto-select or not).

Chammer, thank you for sharing that tip. I'm going to try it and see if this clears up some of the confusion.

To rid this problem why cant Paypal be handled like in Version 3.x where there is not email box just a radio button and when they get to Paypal they can enter their own email which will probably all ready show up because of cookies?

Or instead of the text saying email address have it say "Paypal Address" or "Paypal Email Address"

I am having the same problem I have 2 customers that paid using paypal and the payment did not go through. I emailed them and tried to call them with no luck as of yet.

I also have put in a ticket in about the problem and was told "we cannot track paypal payments. Once they choose paypal, and go to paypal's site, that is all on paypal's end. If they choose not to order at that point, there is nothing we can do. This is why the software highlights all paypal transactions in red, because you would have to go into Paypal and verify payment. Sorry."

I am going to take off this option until it is fixed.

The problem is I don't think the customer is really trying to pay with Paypal. They just keep adding their email address there after putting credit card information in.

I don't think so in my case because at the time I did not accept credit card payments only paypal or check/money order. For some reason they just did not go through the whole process????

This seems like that fastest way to fix the problem!!

Change the wording change the word to Paypal address or Paypal email address or Paypal Payment address, maybe add an additional space between the PayPal and the next payment option.

How about allowing you to sort both payment and custom payment any way you want them sorted....!

It shouldn't be necessary to pass the buyer's email address to PayPal so if it is causing any problems at all, it's probably best to remove it. Is this a modification that MonsterCommerce would need to make?

I was having a lot of problems with customers who were paying by credit card but entering the email address for PayPal, then they kept trying to go back and correct it, each time creating an empty order. This was almost on a daily basis.

Then early this past week I called and spoke on the phone with support, and it was suggested to me that I change the wording in my cart. He explained to me how to do it and walked me through the process and I haven't had any problems since.

All I did was go into Order Information > Online Payment Manager. Then in the PayPal Settings where is says Description: I added <B>Email address below for PayPal payments ONLY</B>

This has solved my problem so far. Maybe it will be of some help to others.

We get at least one or two of these a week as well. We'll get the order information in the cart but no flo in PayPal.

Banging our heads on the keyboard....

Hi! I have forwarded this to our lead Payments Developer. I test MC stores using PayPal all the time and never had any problems with it...but we know that usability is a huge factor so MC will listen to our customers when designing modifications

We have had this problem (including one sale yesterday). I am so fed up with Paypal that I am thinking about disabling the PayPal option.

I hope that PayPal representative who has been occasionally posting will come back and talk to us about this problem. Are you out there?

What are we missing here?
I don't understand the problem, other then the paypal email address box.

From above, I don't think Skipper is getting it either.


I know my volume is low compared to most others, but I have had no problems with abandoned carts or with people having problems paying with credit cards or paypal.

If you see my post above, I added several lines of html to move the email address box away from the credit card box.

Just trying to figure out what the problem is.

The problem is that people are inserting their email into the Paypal address but paying with the credit card i think. But doesnt it clear out the rest of the feilds once you click to another field.

My solutions were to remove it and handle it like in v3.x

OR

Put Paypal Email Addess or Paypal Address or allow us to sort both custom and real time payment together.

We would like to help. I am having trouble understanding what the problem is.

One thing I know is that it should be unnecessary for the MonsterCommerce checkout flow to request the buyer's email address (unless that is what it is using to match back to the completed payment).

Please note that it may be possible that an order is created in MonsterCommerce but that the buyer abandons during the PayPal flow (for a variety of reasons including that the buyer never intended to compelte the purchase in the first place). This is the equivalent of a normal cart abandonment. While we all dislike abandonments, they do happen!

Yes there is a lot of cart abandonement. But I do not think uses it to match the payment back, because whether they do or do not complete payment, it still says they paid.

Okay the problem is not abandonment or putting the email address in wrong, my paypal has worked fine for 8 months and then today 2 paypal orders in a row showed up as double orders, one went through and paid the other the lady said an error message came up and she couldn't complete the order. Now I know it's not a problem with the customer because this same lady has ordered from me lots of times by paypal and they all went through fine untill today and I know she knows how to do it.. so there is definately a problem here somewhere, either at paypal or MC.

We just started to have issues with Paypal again. We do a lot of PayPal business and do not want to turn the option off but we get several orders a day paying for paypal and some payments go through and some do not. In every instance of a payment not going through we contacted the customer and they submitted payment via Paypal manually so we know these orders are legit.

What is the customer not doing to "Complete" the transaction. Does anyone know?

danilyn22,

I'll check with Megan on this one for you... She'll post a reply today.

I'm getting the PayPal problems too and I had no problems with paypal in my old store that was on 3.x....


Terri

We had 2 different paypal problems today also so something changed...

What I would suggest would be to put a PayPal logo into the ~payment type~ or ~description~ fields of the payment option. First download a PayPal logo from their site and then upload it to your server with us using the File Manager. Then place this code into the payment fields

I can't seem to find the thread but I remeber someone from paypal was talking about an automatic system for paypal so the problems like this would be eliminated.

If anyone can find the thread it may be nice to post it here.

Paypal just isn't working well. We're thinking of turningit off. Would anything bad happen if a store just stopped accepting Paypal? All Paypal folks probably have credit cards. Anyone who is buying from an eCommerce store would have a credit card anyway. Any adult in America these days has a credit card. Even 16 year old kids have credit cards.


Most major chain stores don't accept PayPal. I've wondered if taking it makes us look like an amatuerish eBay type operation. I doubt if we would lose sales if we did not take it, and perhaps we would look more professional if we just said no to PayPal.

I've also thought that by taking PayPal, we are supporting its parent company, eBay, which is a competitor for many of us.

Your thoughts?

I am not sure about your last statement as we are not incompetition with Ebay ourselves but as far as Paypal not being used in major stores I know alot of bigger stores are now accepting Paypal.

IE: Tiger Direct.com and I am sure there are more...... It seems for internet shopping Paypal is growing in leaps and bounds which is why in another thread a representative from Paypal I believe wanted suggestions on how to make it a real gateway.

Those of us who sell arts, crafts, handicrafts or vintage pieces probably do compete with eBay -- and are thus supporting the competition with every PayPal sale.

I don't believe that the truly big "big guys" -- amazon, walmart.com, buy.com, etc. are taking PayPal yet.

My basic thesis is that there are few people out there who have paypal accounts who don't also have a credit card.

Hey Robert,

That is true, the only way I see your losing sales is if the customer does not feel safe. That is the main reason a lot of people pay with paypal other then sometimes they might have funds in their Paypal account.