5/17/10
I’ve been investigating this for hours. I’m seeing a change in the behavior of the PayPal “Continue Shopping” buttons.
I’ve had buttons similar to this posted on my web site (and many others) for years:
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="paypal">
<input value="_cart" />
<input value="http://www.ussupernet.com/downpayment.html" />
<input value="QPC4MKCZB5EZE" />
<input value="Web Hosting Payment" />
<input value="20.00" />
<input value="1" />
<input value="http://www.ussupernet.com/success.html" />
<input value="http://www.ussupernet.com/sorry.html" />
<input value="USD" />
<input src="https://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/btn/x-click-but22.gif" alt="Make payments with PayPal - it's fast, free and secure!" />
<input value="1" />
</form>
It used to be that when a user clicked on an “add to cart” button, the PayPal shopping cart opened in a new window, and the buyer could make his payment, or click the “Continue Shopping” button to return to the site to make another purchase. Formerly, if he chose “Continue Shopping”, the payment window would close, and the shopper would be able to resume browsing the web site where he left off. To my knowledge, this all worked nicely in Internet Explorer 7 and the Firefox browser.
Welcome, Internet Explorer 8.
Now it seems that, when you use these same buttons, if you click on the “Continue Shopping” button, the payment window closes, but at the same instant, a new window from the merchant web site opens. So the user will have two versions of the same page open. This does not appear to be an issue when one is using the FireFox browser.
Our friend here, Skier, has shared some of his efforts to address this situation. He has suggested that we change this line:
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="paypal">
To this:
<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" method="post" target="self">
And add another line:
<input type="hidden" name="shopping_url" value="http://www.yourwebsite.com/your_page.html">
When I made the change to the first line and added the second, the button outright fails (when using Internet Explorer 8). One gets a PayPal “Sorry — your last action could not be completed” page. It also creates a problem in the FireFox browser. Instead of returning to the merchant site, it takes the user to a PayPal log-in page.
I would love to hear from Skier, or anyone who has gotten to the bottom of this issue. I have dozens of web sites that have been impacted by this issue that need to be fixed. Anyone may visit www.ussupernet.com/downpayment.php , to see this as a work-in-progress. The $20 button has the target=”paypal” attribute, and the $350 button has the changes that Skier has suggested built into it.
Let me add, that when I tested on another computer that had pop-ups set to be blocked, the button set with target=”paypal” worked the way that it used to, in IE7 – perfectly. As soon as I allowed pop-ups, the second window began appearing when I clicked on “Continue Shopping”.
What’s worse, when I visit the same page using Safari, once you click on any of the buttons, the page seems to stop stone dead, unless you reload it. None of the buttons will work after you’ve already clicked on one.
Have I some gross error somewhere? Maybe I'm having a bad day.
