account buyer buyers contact data item maintain next order payment paypal preferences problem purchase receive sale screen send settings standard support team transaction url variable

After completing a purchase on paypal website payment standard, a thank you page is displayed before redirecting to the e-junkie supplied thank you page.

This paypal thank you page seems to be missing a variable from the purchase. It says :

" Your payment of is complete"

I have uploaded a screenshot here:
http://www.platepuller.com/storage/thanks.jpg

Is this a paypal problem or a missing item descriptor?

That page is on PayPal's site, so the missing payment amount would be an issue at their end rather than anything we could influence.

BTW, that screen indicates you have set Auto Return: ON in your PayPal profile settings, which is fine if you're not selling downloads, but in that case you should also set Payment Data Transfer: ON to maintain compatibility with our system.

Thanks for the quick reply. I will contact paypal and try to work it out with them.

I checked and have confirmed that Auto Return was already set to OFF. Payment Data Trasfer was also set to OFF. This might be an issue on their end as well.

Hi Mikec,

I am experiencing exactly the same problem and also found that my Auto Return in PayPal was already set to OFF as well.

Just wondering if you'd had any luck with PayPal in trying to determine the cause of this?

Cheers.

ross,

I posted the issue on the paypal forum at www.x.com but it hasn't gotten an answer. I've given up on it at this point since it doesn't prevent a sale.

Thanks for the quick response Mikec.

Yes I guess the main thing is that it appears at the end of the purchase process. Still it would be nice to fix so that it doesn't throw customers.

I reckon I'll also have a go at posting it on the paypal forum (or adding to your own post) so that they might pay more attention to the problem.

Cheers

Hey Mikec, I logged a ticket with Paypal Merchant Technical Support but I couldn't find your post on the paypal forum at www.x.com.

You wouldn't happen to have the URL link to that post by any chance would you?

Here's where my question is:

https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/forums/general-support/your- payment-complete-missing-variable#answer-305019

Thanks.

Thanks mikec.

I've posted my issue as an answer to your question - wasnt sure where else to put it and didn't want to add a separate post.

Hopefully the tech support guys might look at it a bit more closely now.

Cheers.

FYI, below is the response I got from PayPal Merchant Technical Support. In short, this is definitely a PayPal issue which they will try to rectify, but the interim workaround is to set Auto-Return to "On", which I don't think I can do as I'm selling a downloadable product. They did send me another message advising they will notify me when its fixed however, so I'll update this post when that happens. Cheers.

"Dear Ross,

Thank you for contacting PayPal Merchant Technical Services.

I've made a testpayment for 0.01 and i could reproduce the issue. We will reverse that transaction as it was a test. However, it appears that this is only happeing if auto return is turned off. You can turn it on and then the amount should show.

Login to your PayPal account
click on Profile
click 'My selling preferences
click on Update next to Website preferences
set Auto Return to On
enter a valid URL in the Return URL text box
scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Save"

I can confirm that this is an issue within our system and i've escalated this to our developers which will fix that. However, as a workaround you can turn on auto return.

I hope this was helpful and if you have any further Questions, please let me know.

Regards,

Volker
PayPal MTS"

nice. Thanks for posting that here. I'm going to do that now and test to confirm.

If you do set Auto Return: ON, make sure you also set Payment Data Transfer: ON as well, to remain compatible with our system. The Return URL you set doesn't really matter, as that would be overridden by the Return URL our cart/buttons specify when we send an order to checkout, but this should work fine as your Return URL setting:
https://www.fatfreecartpro.com/ecom/rp.php

The problem in doing this if you are selling digital products is that buyers may often be auto-returned to our thank-you page before PayPal has a chance to finish processing the buyer's payment and notify our system about that completed payment, so those affected buyers would be unable to claim their download immediately following checkout, and they would need to wait to receive their thank-you email with a link to the download page.

Thanks for the response E-junkieGuru.
As my own products are digital, I think I'd rather live with this issue instead of my customers being auto-returned too soon as you say. Hopefully the PayPal tech team will fix the issue soon.
Cheers,
Ross.

Thanks guys. As I am only selling tangible items I've gone ahead and switched auto return and payment data transfer to on. I have confirmed that this took care of the problem.

thanks man