WARNING! I had this issue. I kept the payments aside and tried them two or three times - each time I received message 10551 that said:
10551: We can't process your transaction right now. Try again later.
However. Several customers then contacted me to say the amounts had left their accounts multiple times, even though they had never been approved as a transaction for my PayPal account. So I have a situation where I have tried to process an amount 2 or 3 times, each time unsuccessful and the amount has NOT entered my account. But the 2 or 3 payments have LEFT the account of the customer. Since the payment was never approved by PayPal, at my end it is still outstanding; the customer thinks I have charged them multiple times because the amounts have left their account; and I have not received the funds so am unable to refund. According to the Help line, which I called for help (as if), if Message 10551 appears, you must not try again to process the card; instead you need to contact the customer for alternate payment. Meanwhile, however, the customer will think you have already taken their payment, because on THEIR account the money has been taken out.
Apparently if the payment was not settled, it will return to the customer's account in 72 hours. Great! So now I have at least 3 customers who not only think I've charged them 3 times, they won't get their money returned for 72 hours. And then - I STILL HAVE TO GET PAYMENT FROM THEM. According to the Help line, there is no way for anyone in PayPal to tell me which customers this has affected. It was suggested that I should have kept a record of those I tried several times. Well, I did, because according to my end of the deal, they remained unpaid. But what about a customer for whom Message 10551 initially came up, but then processed on the second attempt without any issue? Their approved payment came into my PayPal account - but did PayPal also take the initial attempt, like it did with the unsuccessful ones? In which case, how do I know out of my 60 or so payments I processed, which ones I had to process twice to get a payment? Once they were paid I simply filed them.
PayPal says there is no interior record of those attempts or the pending payments. Nobody in PayPal has access to that information. As if. My PayPal account only shows the successful transactions. But there is, apparently, nothing I can do. I cannot know who the people are whose money has been taken multiple times by PayPal.
The suggestion was that if I try to process a payment, and Message 10551 appears, I contact the customer for an alternative card and do not try again. EXCEPT - when the message appears the customer will have had the funds removed already, so will think they have paid me. And in 72 hours, when the funds have been returned, I will have to go back to them to ask for payment. What an absolutely appalling system. I don't understand how it can be legally approved, or how anyone else can be doing business with PayPal under these circumstances.
