Invoices in wrong language

[merchant08]

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business/Language-setting-in-English-but-Paypal-payment-li...

Is anything going to be done about this?? This is beyond stupid. Sending invoices in Chinese to English speaking customers makes no sense.. Is anyone from Paypal actually reading this?

[PayPal_Olivia]

Hi merchant08,

I can see you've posted previously about this. I'm sorry that there hasn't been an answer from the Community. The PayPal Community Help Forums are a member-to-member assistance environment. While there are moderators and employees who are members in the Community, most posts will not be answered by PayPal staff.

I've researched a bit and there are no currently known issues regarding language problems with invoices. If your account pages are appearing to you in English but your invoices are going out in another language, we'd love to get to the bottom of it!

Please give Customer Service a call. A representative will do some account-specific troubleshooting. If the problem can't be determined and fixed on the spot, a ticket can be opened to our engineers to dig deeper and find the issue.

Thank you for your patience! Please come back and let us know what you find. 🙂

Olivia

[merchant08]

Thanks for the clarification Olivia.

I have contacted Customer Service. They sent me to PayPal Merchant Technical Support

PayPal Merchant Technical Support just sent me back to  Customer Service.

So I wrote Customer  Service again.

I will keep everyine posted on the progress.

Thanks 

[merchant08]

Here is the reply I got from Paypal customer service:

I have reviewed your account and it seems that it has been affected by a known issue that has recently been reported with our technical department. They will try to resolve it as soon as possible; however, due to the nature of the issue we cannot provide you a specific timeframe for the resolution at this point.

I regret any inconvenience the situation has caused.

Thank you for your time.

[panoptica]

This is happening to us too.  Our PayPal settings are in English, but to some customers, the invoice we send appears in Thai. I wonder, could it be to do with the windows language setting of the laptop which is used to generate the paypal invoice?

[merchant08]

No, since my windows version is in a different language than what Paypal sends to the receipient. 

The problem is the "Pay Now" link in the payment request email.

Send one to yourself and you will see the email will be in English but the link will look something like this:

If your Paypal account is based in Holland:

https://www.paypal.com/nl/cgi-bin/?cmd=_prq&id=xxxxxxxxxxx

Germany:

https://www.paypal.com/de/cgi-bin/?cmd=_prq&id= xxxxxxxxxxx 

Not sure what the Paypal language code is for Thai, but you get the idea.

All that Paypal has to do is REMOVE the two letter language code before /cgi-bin and the recepient of the payment request email will land on a Paypal site in the language based on their browser/location etc.

OR they should fix their system so that it passes the account LANGUAGE code (specified in your Paypal settings) to the link instead of the sender's  COUNTRY OF ORIGIN code..

Do some tests and you will see that this is the case.

I told Paypal that but apparently this is such a complicated issue they don't even have a time frame for fixing this.... 

[merchant08]

I would like to report that this highly complex issue of removing two characters from the payment request link still remains unsolved. As a result Paypal is sending invoices in wrong languages to our customers. Thank you

[legbefore]

Unfortunately, the solution (if there is one) isn't as simple as removing the country code from the url. We are trying to send an invoice to Denmark from the UK. It keeps displaying in the customer-view invoice in French. The url for the customer view contains "uk" but still shows in French, regardless of whether that country code is present or not. We've tried it here and keep seeing the customer invoice in French, even on an English-language Windows installation, regardless of how we fiddle with the url.

Our customer is refusing to pay until they can see it in English and I can't really blame them. This PayPal stupidity could cost us hundreds of pounds through no fault of our own.

[merchant08]

Well, I basically stopped using Paypal for incoming payments for this reason and made a good deal with a different processor so I'm ok, but it would still make sense to use Paypal every now and then. Any idea why it's displaying in French for you? is your Paypal account associated with France in any way?

[legbefore]

Absolutely no association with France at all. What's more, we've sent invoices to Denmark (different customer) previously and their invoice shows up in English, as expected. We've also sent invoices to various other non-English speaking countries, like Bulgaria,Germany, Greece, etc, without any problem. Goodness only knows why PayPal has chosen French in this one instance, when it has no association with either the seller or the customer.

A simple solution (sort of) is to view the customer-facing invoice in Google's Chrome browser, since it offers to translate (and does a good job). However, telling a customer they've got to install a different browser, just a to pay a bill is a non-starter. Also, the problem isn't just with the invoice, of course. The language is wrong for the entire payment process. In any event, the mere fact that any of this is wrong naturally makes a customer nervous about the reliability of the system they are using to provide payment details.