"you'll be able to review order before you complete your purchase", but order is instantly placed

[sbauer]

I recently had a problem with Paypal where I wasn’t allowed to review the purchase details of a transaction before the order was placed, despite the message on the Paypal page that said “You’ll be able to review your order before you complete your purchase”.

This actually happened to me 3 times in the last month. Here are the details as I explained them to Paypal when disputing the payment:

When this order was placed, I was going through the checkout process to see if there was a place to enter a promo code - and I know these are sometimes not shown until the final stages of checkout. So when I was sent to Paypal to authorize the purchase, I was careful to see that there was a message that said something like "clicking on continue will return you to the seller's site where you can review the order before placing it." So I thought that was fine, since I hadn't decided whether or not I was going to place the order. But when I hit continue, the order was automatically placed. I immediately contacted the seller to tell them of the situation and to say that I wanted a refund... Please advise how I can get my money back.

Paypal reviewed my case and denied my refund “because the documentation we have on file shows that this transaction is valid and was authorized by you.” I had nothing else to prove my claim that I wasn’t allowed to review the order. Fortunately, the seller did return my payment in full.

I recalled that I had a transaction a couple weeks before where I didn’t get to review the order before it was placed but didn’t think much of it because I was ready to make that purchase.

Then I placed an order for software similar to the one in the disputed transaction but with a different company. This time I took screenshots of the checkout screens [see attached files]. Again I was not allowed to view the transaction details before the order was placed, though Paypal clearly stated that I would. This was also a purchase that I was ready to make so I have no dispute regarding this transaction.

But I do feel this is a serious problem that Paypal needs to address. When people pay for goods online, they trust that the system is fair and clear and this situation violates that trust.

I searched Paypal’s Help for a way to contact them and report this problem and I can’t find a place to send a message to them so that I can get a response to my request. Why are they so difficult to contact? Even the Contact Us option just sends me through a maze of preprogrammed responses and categories - none of which addresses my problem.

I did find a post in the Community Forum of someone who had the exact same thing happen to them:
[coolspot Oct-29-2017 09:14 PM
... Did not have a chance to review order?! No Payment Confirmation Screen!
Hi all,
I was ordering some software off a shareware developer’s site and I was not presented with a confirmation screen. After selecting to pay with PayPal, the bottom of the PayPal screen says, “You’ll be able to review your order before you complete your purchase”.
So I click “Agree and Continue” and I was immediately I was charged for the item!
There was no payment confirmation screen?
Why is that?]

They go on to say they contacted Paypal Support [wonder how they did that?] and got this response:
[...you are correct in noting that there is no confirmation page after clicking on “Agree and Accept.” Since this seems to be an error with the merchant’s site, we cannot issue to refund outright as of yet.]

Well, I’ve had this happen to me 3 TIMES in the last month from 3 DIFFERENT merchant’s so it doesn’t seem to be an isolated incident. And even if it is a problem on the merchant’s part, Paypal is the one saying “You’ll be able to review your order before you complete your purchase”. So they need to take responsibility for their part in this misrepresentation. Perhaps they need to require participating merchants to have a confirmation screen or be in violation of Paypal policies.

I’ve been using Paypal for over 15 years and never had a problem like this before.

Has anyone noticed this problem when going through the checkout process?

Does anyone know how to get Paypal attention to address this issue?

[misio23]

Hello, we are a "merchant" who had the same problem while developing our payment section -- users were redirected to PayPal for payment, but then when clicked on the button "Continue", they were redirected back to our website, there was no step to review or finalize the payment.

The problem is NOT on PayPal side, it is on the Merchant side (i.e. on our side, in our case) -- to fix, when merchants create the order with an API call, they must include "user_action":"PAY_NOW", like this:

"intent":"CAPTURE" ............. "application_context":{"user_action":"PAY_NOW"}

The above will ensure that PayPal shows the button "PAY NOW" and not "CONTINUE".

Here is more info, for developers:

https://developer.paypal.com/docs/api/orders/v2/#definition-order_application_context