Issue with ascii characters resulting from shopping_url

[SPG900NY]

I have a site where I have multiple "Add to Cart" buttons and a hidden shopping_url value. Things seem to have been working fine until today when suddenly if you're using Firefox and try to click on "Continue Shopping," you are taken to the Paypal homepage. When you look at the URL, it now has ascii characters where the dots and colon are in www.mysite.com so what should be this: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/http://www.mysite.com is now this:

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/http://www%#46;mysite.com

Any clues what might be going on? The original page hidden shopping_url looks fine.

Thanks.

[cgdot]

Sorry, don't have a solution but I am also noticing this same problem in firefox for at least the last 3 days (& probably longer). IE appears to be processing the shopping_url value correctly. Not sure about other browsers such as chrome & safari.

[SPG900NY]

Thanks for the reply. Good to know I'm not the only one with the issue. I'm on the phone with them right now and they're looking into it. I can confirm that IE works as well, and I can also confirm Chrome does not, which probably means Safari does not as well.

I will post back when I get an answer from them. I hope they correct this soon because nothing on my end seems to make any difference.

[SPG900NY]

So wow. Just wow. She saw the error, she saw that it is Paypal's own page that interpret the shopping_url incorrectly and changes the characters to ascii code and she said Paypal recommends that you only use Internet Explorer.

That's it?

Then I heard, we're making some changes to our website for the past two days and it may cause some issues with the API and if your users use MSIE they will be fine.

I'm like, really? Paypal is honestly telling me that they're not going to support 20-30% of the users out there?

She said "we're looking into it, don't you worry."

Then she gave me the number of technical support - 800.852.1973 and said I could call them tomorrow, but "don't you worry, I'm filing a report on this right now and we're going to fix it, don't you worry."

???

Wow... Stunned, I am...

[SPG900NY]

Latest response... Still working on it... I guess that's something...

Thank you for contacting PayPal Merchant Technical Services. We are aware of this issue and we are working to resolve it. I will research this matter further and update you with more information as it becomes available. If you have any additional information or updates to your issue, please use the instructions in this email to update your ticket.

Thank you for your patience.

Sincerely,
Chad
Merchant Technical Support
PayPal, an eBay Company

[cgdot]

That's pretty amazing!! So when something breaks in IE, are they going to say, well just use firefox or some other browser instead. At least you were able to get through and replicate the error on their end. I guess that's something. Thank you for following up with Paypal for what it's worth. Hopefully, they will address it as customers will use whatever browser they prefer.

[SPG900NY]

Yeah, I'm encouraged that they saw it and acknowledged that it's their issue, rather than trying to cover it up and say it's something I did, but I'm wondering how long this is going to take to fix? I mean, this is a major hassle and I hate having to tell our users to just use MSIE.

No word yet. I will definitely post the end result assuming I get one.

[3dfiction]

same here and unbelievable, unlogical problem and support. hope they solve asap.

serdar camlica

http://3dfiction.com

[DChannah]

I am having the same problem too and it is affecting my sales significantly - whereas I receive several sales a day, since I noticed this problem yesterday morning, all sales have stopped even though this is suppose to be working in IE I haven't seen any indication it is.  My continue shopping code has worked fine for years up until yesterday.  When I found out that Paypal was updating, I began to worry as I know problems has come up with my shopping cart or working properly when they did their updates.

I submitted a ticket and received the below response:

Thank you for contacting Merchant Services.

This a known issue in our system as you advised, that is affecting Firefox and Google Chrome (all browsers except IE) when the shopping_url variable is included in the cart.

My apologies for the inconveniences. I can't give you a timeframe for the issue to be resolved by our engineers; however, I will leave this ticket opened so that you can be automatically notified of its resolution.

Thanks for your patience.

Kind Regards,

Ignacio.
Merchant Technical Services
PayPal, an eBay Company