Shipping unavailable...again, and always on international addresses.

[Secondsilver]

This is the second time in a month I have had this occur.  I have sold an item, 1 through prostores the second through ebay - paypal accepts the payment from the buyer but when I try to ship the item, paypal pops up with message shipping unavailable.

Shipping as a whole is available, as I am able to use the paypal shipping for other items but when I try to return and ship the item in question the message comes up again.

If the address is a problem why did paypal accept the payment???  Going to the post office to ship the item is NOT the answer as the PO does not offer the online number required for proof of shipping when using the "light packet" option.  I spoke to Can Post and told them this glitch was occuring.  This was a system exclusive to ebay, paypal and Can Post to offer the online tracking info... too bad its not working and no one seems to want to fix it.

[Amanda411]

Hi Secondsilver,

Welcome!

What is the exact error message you're seeing?

Have you checked the address to ensure that it is a valid address?

Amanda

[Secondsilver]

Its not really an error message per say but rather a yellow info box that appears at the top of the final page that says "Paypal shipping unavailable. Sorry for the inconvenience. Please try again later." 

Paypal shipping is not "unavailable" on the whole as I was able to ship other items, it is just not available for the particular items. In both recent cases as with a couple I have had in the past they are overseas but not all the same country and not areas of turmoil or conflict. 

One would think that if paypal accepts and approves the payment from the buyer it is a valid address otherwise what is the point of using paypal?  If the address is invalid paypal should refuse the payment.  I informed both buyers that this was a paypal issue and that I could not ship until the problem was fixed. 

I have emailed pp about this and got a "standard pre printed reply" that was a direction on how to ship in general, plainly my email was not read so the issue remains unresolved.  It is a totally frustrating problem and I have no idea when the problem will suddenly surface again!

Thanks for the reply and actually reading the issue!

[VagServ]

For future reference for others who have had this issue:

The problem seems to be with Paypal for some countries outside the US/Canada (the UK being one) allowing address fields that are much longer than typical for here.  If you change the address a bit so that it fills all of our fields (eg. moving part of the Address1 field to Address 2) it should work fine.

[Secondsilver]

Hey thanks!!!! Will definately try that when it pops up again! 

[LightAction]

I'm having the same problem.  I'm trying to ship a package from Canada to the U.S. using UPS and I get the message "PayPal Shipping is not available".  I can ship with CanadaPost no problem.  All of my UPS account info is correct.  Why do I keep getting this message?  Very frustrating!