10417 - Transaction cannot complete.

[Sami-C]

Error 10417 

The transaction cannot complete successfully.

"Instruct the customer to use an alternative payment method.

Correcting the Error: Instruct the customer that PayPal is unable

to process the payment and redisplay alternative payment methods with

which the customer can pay."

Hi All,

I am a developer and have integrated with the PayPal Express Checkout system. We have our own in-house ecommerce system. A number of our customers are reporting that their customers randomly cannot make payments. Our error handling allows us to catch the error sent by PayPal, this being the error above.

The API gives no elaborate explanation to this and does not put it down to one thing. I've read several "theories" online as to what this error message means, but am yet to find any concrete evidence. I'm hoping that some PayPal officials can discuss the issue with myself. I would be happy to give some ID's to help track down one or two of the attempted transactions to see if any further light could be shed.

One of the common ideas I've read about is that the user could have multiple credit cards tied to their account, and one of them is valid. Surely you should only require 1 valid credit card to make a successful transaction though? When this error has occurred though, it has happened across a number of our websites around the same time, which makes me thing it is potentially a service outage issue. If this is the case, it seems to happen far too often for a company of PayPal's size.

Ultimately I would just like some more information as our customers are losing abandoned orders, and we have nothing significant to report on this.

Thank you for your time.

[MadAsHE77]

I have received this error as well as 10486.  Paypal is blaming the cc company and the cc company is blaming paypal.  They are visa gift cards with more than enough to cover the ebay purchase!  I have bought things with either card before with no problem until about 2 weeks ago.  Ask sarah is completely useless.

Any help would be appreciated.

[argh]

Usually, when the bank says it's paypal, it is paypal.   Paypal has their own layer of "approval" on credit card purchases that is used BEFORE sending the transaction down the line to the bank.    

This allows them to, for example, reject a perfectly good credit card transaction because the owner of said credit card, for example, had a paypal account 8 years ago and was overdrawn by 32 cents.

Not a ficticious example, by the way.  We use Paypal Pro to collect credit card payments.  It's a different service than "regular paypal", and is supposed to be a competitor to a merchant account.    Unknown to me, they filter the credit cards transaction through their "has this credit card ever done anything to make Paypal mad" filter.    I've lost several customers to this crappy setup.    It rejects the transaction, so I ask the customer to call their CC company.  The CC company says they never saw a transaction from us, so therefore they didn't decline it...further, they confirm that the transaction SHOULD have gone through.   At that point, I have to explain to the customer that Paypal declined it, and no, sorry, there's no phone number for them to call and complain.   They are just out of luck unless they use another credit card.

Argh. Argh. Argh.

[mserinpa]

I can't pay and I only have (make that "had" thanks to PayPal removing it) one credit card listed with PayPal.  One seller tried to cancel my order another opened an unpaid case against me.  Started having probs when they intro'ed new check out.  Some items would drop off list and not get paid for.  Crazy!  Nothing like instituting something new when the bugs haven't been worked out, yet!  Great Fing going PayPal!  Oh, yeah, thanks for wasting my time on the phone only to give me the run around and point to MasterCard as the problem!