More payment problems

[Ali00001]

My customers have been having problems at checkout lately. I have Paypal and Credit Card payments through Paypal Pro set up.
These are some of the messages in the "payment response" column that we have been getting:

103 - Error reading response from Host: Host Stream Error for '', trxID=totnesnappycompany

12 - Declined: 10417-The transaction cannot complete successfully. Instruct the customer to use an alternative payment method. (pending reason: )

Also we had one that said that the customer needed to enter the "state" but unfortunatly I have deleted that one so can't post the exact message.

This last one is probably to do with the stupid US states thing in checkout that causes constant confusion. The second one I guess could be an out of date card. The first one, which has been the most common, is a mystery.

The biggest headache about it all is that the payments are actually going through but the customer thinks that it has not gone through, so they try again, resulting in several payments that need to be refunded. Even payments that have gone through once have had to be refunded as customers have thought that their order has not been taken and have shopped elsewhere.

After several conversations with Paypal they have said:
"If you are seeing multiple payments in your PayPal account, the issue would be with your shopping cart and the way that the cart is interpreting the response from the API. For example, if you have your PayPal account set to 'accept' an AVS failure in your profile Risk Control settings, the API will return an AVS-N response yet still process the payment. The cart may be seeing the AVS-N in the return information from the API call and interpret the response as the payment not processing.
This is something that you will need to contact your cart provider on as the error message is being generated from your cart and not by the PayPal API."

Clear as mud to me. Hope someone else can throw some light on it before I lose any more sales.

Perhaps all of these are one-off problems but it is strange that we have never had any problems before and all of a sudden we are having several problems a week.

[TraceyG]

Hi Ali,

There have been a number of customers reporting payment issue's when using the Paypal Pro payment module. These issue's relate to an update Paypal made to their payment system a short while back which causes transactions to be reported as failed even though payment is taken.

What is happening is the Paypal system sends a message back to Express saying the payment was unsuccessful, even though it had been accepted by Paypal and the customer card is charged.

These issue's are out of our control since they are caused at the Paypal end of the system, we have made Paypal aware of these issue's and have been chasing them relentlessly since the issue was first brought to our attention.

The latest update we have from Paypal is that the issue was resolved on the 21st March but we don't yet have official confirmation of this.

Our development team suggest contacting Paypal to open a support ticket (which you obviously have already done), telling them that you are getting an error along with the exact error message, you should also supply Paypal with the Payment Reference for the error message which can be found in the Payment History section of the edit order screen. This should help Paypal narrow down the problem.

I'm sorry to pass you back to Paypal but it really is a problem at their end. Please let us know if you have any joy with them and maybe if anyone else has managed to get their problems resolved, it would be good to know how they got Paypal to sort it out.

[Ratty]

I had so many problems with paypal that I had to give up. I think you will find it worthwhile if you take the plunge and open a merchant account. Its trouble free and much cheaper commissions

[Ali00001]

Thanks Tracey.

We have had enough orders without the problem for me to tentatively say that I think the problem must have been fixed around the 21st, which is a big relief!

As for a merchant account, the ones I looked into had expensive set up fees (whereas Paypal Pro had none) and were £20 per mth (same as paypal Pro). The transaction charges are more with Paypal and Paypal Pro but at the moment we are not really putting through enough volume to justify the start up costs.

I don't really like having all my eggs in one Paypal basket and a merchant account is something we will look into later but for a small business such as ours Pro is a good solution.