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Oct 2015

Just recently (past 2-4 days) orders are coming in with "false" in the city. This only happens to the "ship to" city. I think we only notice it when we process orders for customers through our website at our store location (zip code 92121).



Did anything change on your end in the past few days? If not, do you suppose PayPal is looking at the ip address of the computer that purchased it and compares it with the zip code in the checkout page?



Nothing has changed on our end.

  • created

    Oct '15
  • last reply

    Oct '15
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That is really strange. I'm seeing that 'false' city name in your Transaction Log, so I'll have to ask Development to investigate what's going on there. Thanks for bringing this to our attention!

Turns out those bogus 'false' city names were coming from PayPal's end; somehow they were occasionally dropping the shipping address city name that our card-based checkout form was submitting to them, and the IPN we later received from them confirming completed payment contained the value 'false' where they should have inserted the city name.



We've implemented a workaround where we briefly retain a copy of the original address information the buyer submitted in our checkout form, so whenever PayPal returns address_city='false' to us, we can just ignore that and substitute the city name originally submitted. I've asked Development to see if they have any way to rectify the city name in past affected orders' data in your transaction log and will do so if possible, but otherwise you can use this USPS ZIP code lookup tool to determine the city:

https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipLookupAction!input.action?mode=2

Ok, thank you for the prompt support. I don't need anything done to my transaction log as I'll never download it again. It was probably only confusing to the few affected customers who saw it on their order confirmation.

This appears to be be resolved by now, last affected transaction was on Oct. 15th. Development also says they were able to rectify affected shipping address data, so your Transaction Log should now be showing the correct city name for all orders.

Actually, for me, the transaction log is fine, but the PayPal packing slip for my last two orders lists the city as "false". Both of these orders were placed after October 15.

I'm afraid we can't change whether or not PayPal properly records the information we send them, we can only make sure that we keep it properly recorded in our own records. We're still not even sure why PayPal fails on these records in the first place; that would be an issue to take up with PayPal themselves; but you can count on our sales notifications and any order data you get from our system to be complete.