Customers in the Netherlands can't use Guest Checkout

[GaviaImmer]

We sell software online, and we are using a PayPal shopping cart on our site to process payments. About half of our sales are from outside the United States.

A customer at a Dutch university sent me a screenshot showing that he is required to create a PayPal account to complete his purchase. They are not allowed to use PayPal accounts for purchases, so he asked me for another way to pay by credit card.

When I called Customer Service they had no idea what was going on, and after escalating a couple of times they just gave me the phone number for PayPal Europe and told me to ask them. This was not helpful.

Using Google Translate, we can see that the PayPal site for the Netherlands says that customers do not need to have a PayPal account to pay with a credit card. However, using a proxy server based in the Netherlands to try and make a purchase on our site, we replicated his exact problem. It does not offer the option of checking out without a PayPal account.

To our knowledge, no other purchaser from any country has had this problem.  We need to find out if there is anything we can do about this or if this is an issue with other European versions of PayPal. If we can't fix this, we will have to change over to a conventional credit card processor, and after many negative experiences with them, we would very much like to avoid that.

Any ideas for a fix for this that doesn't require massively inconveniencing our customers and making us look unprofessional?

[sharpiemarker]

Go to your seller preferences > website preferences > PayPal account Optional

[GaviaImmer]

We have always allowed people to check out without a PayPal Account. Most of our customers do not have PayPal accounts. It does not seem to apply to people making a payment from the Netherlands, though. The 'Checkout As Guest' button does not appear for them.  It is extremely frustrating.

[lancelotme]

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=%5fdisplay%2dcountry%2dfunctionality%2doutside&dispatch=58...

what credit card are they using? 

[GaviaImmer]

He hasn't put in his credit card yet. It is asking him to create a PayPal account and he isn't allowed to use one for making purchases. Our business counts on customers being able to purchase our products and services using a credit card without having to create a PayPal account. If people in other countries are prohibited from using a credit card via PayPal without an account, that is a problem.  We want to see if this can be changed or if this issue extends beyound Holland.   And unfortunately, the people I talked to in Customer Service had no knowledge of what I was talking about and seemed to have no idea how to find out what I needed to know.

[sharpiemarker]

Did you check your website preferences to make sure PayPal accounts optional setting is turned on though? Tell the buyer to use a different browser, clear browser cache and cookies, or not use a proxy server or use different device.

[GaviaImmer]

Yes, it is turned on. I double checked.  As I said, most of our sales are to people in the US and abroad who do not have paypal accounts.

We used a proxy to pretend we are in the Netherlands and we got the same checkout he did. When we used our US IP address and browser to initiate an identical transaction with his email and Netherlands shipping address we were allowed to use Guest Checkout.

There is apparently something different allowed for buyers using paypal from the Netherlands. This could cause us a lot of headaches if it isn't just a glitch. Trying to find out if it's true in other countries, as well.

[sharpiemarker]

Send buyer an invoice and see if it'll allow guest checkout.

[GaviaImmer]

After many Customer Service calls, someone went up the technical chain far enough to find out that there are issues with Guest Checkout in some European Union countries. In the Netherlands, you can only use guest checkout a few times supposedly and then you have to get an account. In Germany, you aren't ever allowed to use Guest Checkout. Apparently it has to do with credit card fraud or some other banking regulations.  We've been promised an email list of restrictions/limitations by country once they've had time to gather it up.

PayPal should post a list of what features and services are and aren't allowed in different countries, and what the various restrictions are.  Even their Customer Service employees don't know.  

We had two researchers from Turkey attempt to purchase from us in early August but they were unable to check out with PayPal. As it turns out, Turkey no longer allows PayPal transactions as of June 2016. We had to do a lot of digging to find out what was going on, and in the meantime had very frustrated customers. The PayPal CS staff didn't know anything about it, but we finally read about it in some news stories when we googled it.  PayPal Turkey still appears to exist, but no one in the country is able to make payments with it, at least outside the country.  Our customers were forced to spend a fortune on wire transfer fees to send their payment, and we paid about 20% of the value of the sales to receive the wire.

[lancelotme]

do yourself a favor,copy the list

turkey is not on the list

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=%5fdisplay%2dcountry%2dfunctionality%2doutside&dispatch=58...