PayPal Avanced vs. Pro

[manytrickssw]

Unfortunately, only one user reported that exact error message. The rest were just along the lines of "it didn't accept my credit card."



I'll ask these folks to try with third-party cookies enabled to see what happens; thanks for finding that tidbit. I'll post back with any results.



-rob.

[manytrickssw]

OK, the third-party cookies issue definitely helped a couple of our users ... but it's a major flaw in the system, for at least a huge percentage of our prospective customers.



We sell software to Mac users, and Safari is the dominant browser on the Mac -- very dominant. And unfortunately for us in this case, it defaults to disabling third-party cookies. That means that a very high percentage of our credit card purchase attempts will fail; probably much higher than those on other browsers.



*** EDIT: Chrome also blocks third-party cookies by default, and it seems IE 10 will do so, too -- not sure about IE 9. That means only Firefox ships with them enabled, and I would guess that will be changing soon, given the others' defaults. ***



Given that this issue is on the fatfreecartpro page, can you at least put up a big obvious warning box, explaining that users will have to allow third-party cookies, in order for the transaction to work? Ideally, this warning would contain a link that led to an explanation on how to do that in the major browsers, too.



But this is just a short-term fix suggestion; long term, using third-party cookies isn't acceptable, due to the security issues. If e-Junkie can't improve this process, we're going to have to figure out another way to accept credit cards (does this same issue exist with PayPal Pro?) ... and that would probably mean we'd need to start looking for a different cart solution, as we can't mix two systems together on our checkout page.



We've been very happy with e-Junkie thus far, and would hate to have to leave ... but we can't have a credit card system (where users are sometimes rightfully cautious to begin with) that requires a user to change a default browser setting



-rob.

[manytrickssw]

I just heard back from PayPal on my open ticket there, and here's what they had to say:



"That makes sense, but there would not be any way around that. The iFrame is going to be using PayPal's domain not yours or eJunkie's. That means the particular method that eJunkies is using is not going to work by default for a lot of browsers going forward. They will either have to not use the iFrame and direct customers to PayPal for the checkout with Layout A or B in the Hosted Checkout. "



So is there a way for us to not rely on third-party cookies, given that most major browsers are now disabling them by default?



-rob.

[manytrickssw]

Any update on this issue? I'm still getting multiple daily emails from customers unable to purchase our apps; I have a stock reply I now send, explaining how to enable third party cookies ... but this is horrid from a customer perspective.



thanks;

-rob.

[ellen]

Hi Rob,



After poking at what we could do about this (and me being out sick for a week), we've switched to just redirecting to PayPal's payment form, rather than including it as an iframe in out own detail page. This solves the 3rd-party cookie issue for now, at the expense of not being able to show order summary detail on the payment page. It's not the user experience we had planned when we developed the integration with PayPal, but at least it's not turning away customers because of browser issues.

[manytrickssw]

Sorry to hear you were sick, but glad the non-response here wasn't a sign of ignoring the problem :).



I realize this isn't an ideal solution for you guys, but for me, it appears to be much better -- they'll still see the details after they pay, and will no longer get kicked out for (what to them are) mysterious reasons.



thanks!

-rob.

[manytrickssw]

An unfortunate follow-up: our troubles persist. I just had a customer report a failed transaction, when everything looks good. He even has third party cookies allowed. I have the screenshots, and can email them if you'd like.



Basically, he's got:



* A valid name and address

* A valid credit card (used just this morning, he tells me) and CCV

* Third party cookies enabled, just to be safe



When he clicks Pay Now, he gets the mysterious "whose error is this?" message:



"Some required information is missing or incorrect. Please correct the fields below and try again.



• Error: An error has occurred. Please contact the system administrator"



Do I have to do anything in my PayPal Manager to reflect the change you made? That is, I still have it set to using Layout C; should I change that to A or B?



-rob.

[E-junkie_Guru]

You shouldn't need to change anything in your PayPal Manager settings; we're still using Layout C, but now we're just displaying the PayPal Payments Advanced payment screen as-is, rather than embedding it in an IFRAME which was causing the third-party cookie issue. Any errors that screen is producing could only come from PayPal's end, as that page is hosted on PayPal's servers, and the buyer is only redirected there after we've transmitted their order details to PayPal.



The fact that any PayPal Payments Advanced checkouts are working at all indicates the integration at our end is correct, as any mistake in our integration would cause all such checkouts to fail, so it seems either PayPal is sporadically dropping the ball, or perhaps affected buyers are entering their payment information in some weird way that PayPal cannot handle properly. Googling the error you reported, I found one mention on PayPal's developer forum stating that card numbers must be entered as a continuous 16-digit number, without any spaces, dashes, or other divisions in the full card number.



If you have screenshots of actual error messages, feel free to email those to support, so Development can try to research the matter further:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php

[manytrickssw]

I went back to the customer, and he assured me he wasn't using any spaces. However, he also included this tidbit:



"The only other thing I had done is I was viewing the ManyTricks.com from Firefox. Since I like to keep my browser activity for banks and CC/PayPal separate from occasional browsing, I right-clicked and copied the "Buy Now - $10" link and opened it in Safari.



https://www.e-junkie.com/ecom/gb.php?c=cart&i=646650&cl=109807&ejc=2"



I had him try directly in Safari, and it worked ... so why would it fail when he copied our Buy Now link to another browser? Is there something you can verify on your end if a user does this, so they won't run into the same problem? (i.e. is it a cookie problem, or something else?)



regards,

-rob.

[E-junkie_Guru]

We tested that link in Safari on both Mac and Windows, where we had no trouble at least getting to the final payment page, though of course we didn't try entering card info to complete an actual payment. As you can see by the browser URL on the final checkout screen where the buyer would enter their card info, that page is served up by PayPal, so we have no influence nor insight over things by that point.



There's absolutely no difference in the checkout process by using a purchase button on your site vs. copying the button's link URL to visit directly, so that along with the fact the buyer was eventually able to complete checkout in Safari suggests they most likely just tripped over some transient glitch at PayPal's end the first time they tried submitting their card details at checkout, or maybe they just made a typo or stray keypress they didn't notice on their first attempt.



If you get more reports with details indicating a consistent, reproducible pattern, such as problems only happening in Safari, we'd suggest opening a ticket about that with PayPal MTS (and of course, the more details and specific, actual error messages you can provide, the better):

https://ppmts.custhelp.com/

[lolabfree]

E-junkieGuruI've just updated our PayPal Payments Advanced integration help page with those extra details you mentioned:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced-shopping-cart.htm



Thanks for working with us to iron out these last few wrinkles in our setup procedure and documentation for this new checkout method. :^)

Hi there,

I just setup the Paypal Advanced according to the new instructions but cannot get a credit card payment through. The Paypal guy said that I need to have e-junkie be set to the Paypal Advanced Gateway and that's why it's failing. I looked under Payment Preferences, and there is no place to put Paypal Advanced, in fact Paypal Standard is checked, which is a different gateway. The only other option is Paypal Pro. I have entered the info at https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/setupppa.php#status. Right now I have tried a different user, and that crashes outright, and I have also tried to have the merchant login and user be the same, and that gives me an general error on the screen where I enter my cc info.



Please help, as I'm getting ready to launch my new teleseminar on Wednesday.

Thanks

-Karen

[E-junkie_Guru]

Right now there is no setting in Payment Preferences for the new PayPal Payments Advanced service; we're adding the relevant settings for that in the new Seller Admin we're building, and meanwhile we're just using that separate setup_ppa.php page you referenced. As long as you follow the setup instructions we provide for PayPal Advanced, and don't change any settings in your Payment Preferences afterwards -- and presuming everything is fine with your PayPal account setup at their end -- it should work fine:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced-shopping-cart.htm



It appears you have the relevant settings entered properly at our end, though of course we cannot tell whether the settings you entered are a correct match for the actual username(s) and password in your PayPal Manager account, so you may want to double-check those credentials in your PayPal Manager account and re-enter them in our setup page. We recommend using your computer's copy-paste functions to make sure what you enter in our setup page exactly matches what's in your PayPal Manager.



If you're still having troubles after that, please copy any actual error messages you're seeing and paste those into a reply here, or email them to our support team:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php

[lolabfree]

Hi,

Okay, after a full day and a half on this issue and speaking to almost everyone at Paypal, I think I am going to have to go back to Paypal Standard. Can you get me back there, please? I cannot simply take out the fields that I entered on the setup screen (merchant login etc). I am running out of time, and it's just easier at this point.

Thanks so much, and thanks for your quick response :-)

-K

[E-junkie_Guru]

It appears Development has now reverted your E-junkie account back to using PayPal Standard checkout, just wanted to followup to your post about that here as well.

[mkp007]

Hmm, going to paypal advanced seems a bit more risky now. Any new developments on this? You mentioned a new seller admin, when do you suppose that will be released?



Will there be any difference from the checkout standpoint between Pro and advanced. I'm assuming there will be the same credit card and paypal buttons. After clicking the credit card button, are the customers taken to the same checkout screen? After checkout, do they see the same confirmation page? If so, it would be worth switching to advanced because the only other functionality with pro is the virtual terminal which I don't use that often. Also, both options are capable of the Paypal Here which is the swipe device.

[E-junkie_Guru]

There was a bug with parameter parsing at PayPal's end that we'd been working on with them as of a few weeks ago. Last I heard, PayPal hadn't fixed the bug yet, but they'd suggested a workaround which we implemented, and in our testing that seemed to keep the problem from happening. We haven't received any further reports of trouble with PayPal Advanced since then.



You can test our PayPal Advanced demo page to see how the checkout process for card-based direct payments would look and work with that service:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced.htm



After payment is completed, the buyer would be directed to the same thank-you page as with any other payment method we support.