Problems With Checkout

[dodgebill]

In the past few months my online store has been getting a lot of incomplete payments for orders. It's about half of all orders that do not finish the payment process. The customers all swear they did make payments and then scream to high heaven about how we are trying to rip them off by double charging them. It's really hurting our business. Is there a potential problem or what can we do to help these people figure out how to use your payment system correctly?

Thanks In Advance

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi dodgebill,

Welcome to the community! 🙂

I'm sorry to hear about these problems.  Half of your orders is quite a lot and indicates that there is probably a technical issue there.

Are you using standard PayPal buttons?  Is your website using PayPal Express Checkout? Are you using a 3rd party shopping cart?  Are these buyers reporting any error messages?

These are just a some the questions we would need to know to troubleshoot the issue.  I recommend contacting Merchant Technical Services to have somebody take a closer look at this issue.  It could be an issue with your shopping cart or it could be an issue with PayPal.  In many cases these issues are due to a problem on the buyer's side. Since this is happening to half of your orders, I'm inclined to think it's not an issue with the buying accounts but it's still possible.

I hope this issue can be resolved quickly to minimize the impact to your business.

- Frank

[dodgebill]

Thanks for your reply. I am using CubeCart 4. I have been using it since it launched many years ago. I posted there to see if anyone was having problems or if there were known issues. None so far.  As far and I can tell this only happens for people without a PayPal account but are using a credit card to pay.

The exact problem is this.

The customer checks out in our store through our shopping cart. They are then taken to PayPal to checkout. Everything goes as it should and they pay for the order. Only problem is nothing happens. The payment just dissapears at that point. When they go back and try again the system will not allow that card anymore. It says "please enter the correct city,  zip code and state" but when they do that the same error keeps coming up. Again, so far any customer with a PayPal account gets through just fine.

Any help would be great.

Thanks

Bill

[PayPal_Frank]

Hi dodgebill,

Thank you for clarifying the issue.  It sounds like there is an issue with the address being passed from cube cart to PayPal or it could also be related to address blocking settings in cube cart.  I don't know if upgrading to a newer version of cube cart would help but it might be something to look into.

I found this thread on the cubecart forums which may contain helpful information:

PayPal Standard Error

That might help but that doesn't explain why this is only affecting Guest Checkout.  I'm going to assume that your website collects the billing/shipping address before the customer is sent to PayPal to pay?  Does all that information carry over to PayPal when they choose Guest Checkout?

At this point, I have to recommend contacting Merchant Technical Support for assistance so they can review your account and check the API calls/ logs.  Especially since buyers are being told their payment has been sent when it has not.

- Frank

[dodgebill]

That issues seems to be only with CubeCart 5. There is no address blocking in cubecart 4 and we do not have our paypal account set to block payments to non matching addresses either. It does not give an error the first time you try. The payment just disappears. The error only comes when you try to pay again. Maybe because it has the same invoice number? I took the block off multiple payments today but there have been no lost payments yet. 

I put in a ticket the the merchant tech team. Thanks for directing me there. I'll wait to see if they can figure this out.

Thanks again for your help.

Bill