PayPal Avanced vs. Pro

[silverbackgorilla]

Hi,



I just noticed that PayPal has a new Advanced account. I am currently selling through PayPal Pro. From what I can tell, it looks like the Advanced can accept credit cards but is only $5/month instead of $30/month for the service fee.



A couple of questions.



First, is there any difference between these services for the customer's view in the E-Junkie cart?



Second, the setup procedure looks different. Is there a way to make the switch seamless without any interruption to the credit card payment option working?



Thanks

[E-junkie_Guru]

We actually just added support for PayPal Payments Advanced a couple weeks ago; you can see a demo of the checkout process for Advanced payments here:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced.htm



We're still polishing off a few rough edges in the appearance of checkout screens for the card-based checkout option with PayPal Advanced, but it should function just fine. This help page explains how to set up PayPal Advanced for your E-junkie account:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced-shopping-cart.htm



Once you complete that integration procedure, the transition should be seamless with your existing E-junkie Cart buttons.

[silverbackgorilla]

OK, thanks.

[manytrickssw]

I'm having some trouble with this. I have the PayPal Advanced account approved, and I've created a new user for transactions, as per the instructions. However, I'm getting this error:



"We're sorry, but an error occurred while processing your payment to PayPal. This error has been logged. You might want to go back and try your transaction again.

Error 1: User authentication failed"



On https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/setupppa.php, I entered our PayPal email address, our partner (PayPal), our proper Merchant ID as shown on PayPal, and then the User and Password for the non-manager account on PayPal Advanced.



What confuses me is if, after submitting the info, I go to the Payment Preferences section of our eJunkie account, it's showing the Login ID as my Merchant Login (which is the same as our Login Name for the manager account on PayPal). However, the associated password that's shown is for the separate billing-only account I set up, per your instructions.



I've tried changing the user/pass shown there to match either my billing-only ID or (not recommended, I know) our master account. In both cases, I get the same error as shown above.



Help, please -- the credit card badge is now live on our cart, but we can't use it, and it won't be long before prospective customers start complaining.



thanks!

-rob.

[E-junkie_Guru]

I've bought this to Development's attention; if you could, please email Support to start a ticket about this issue, so we can exchange details privately about the parameters you're entering:

https://www.e-junkie.com/ej/contact.php



The fields we require on our PayPal Advanced setup screen should be as follows:



- PayPal Email: should be the email address you use to log into your PayPal account, or a secondary email linked to that account, where you will receive PayPal account-based checkout payments (rather than card-based payments) -- this field would be pre-filled and read-only if you'd already entered your PayPal Email in Seller Admin > Edit Profile;



- Partner: should be 'PayPal' unless you know that you use an Internet Merchant Account from a different provider;



- Merchant Login: This should be your main PayPal Manager login username (which is different from the login email for your regular PayPal account);



- User: This should be the username you want to use for transaction processing, such as a secondary account you may have added to your PayPal Manager for processing transactions (as we recommend for security), or otherwise this should be the same as your Merchant Login;



- Password: This should be the password for the account username you provided in the User field.

[manytrickssw]

This is exactly how I have it set up; I'll open a trouble ticket.



-rob.

[sankalp]

paypal is the most popular in the online business.



http://www.sankalptech.com | http://www.mart2web.com

[manytrickssw]

With some help from your engineering department, it appears we're now up and running. The setup instructions on e-Junkie need to be modified to reflect some additional changes required on the PayPal Manager account -- I don't remember what they all were, so I'm not going to try to enumerate them here. But I imagine the installation page will be modified with the new info in the near future...



-rob.

[E-junkie_Guru]

I've just updated our PayPal Payments Advanced integration help page with those extra details you mentioned:

http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced-shopping-cart.htm



Thanks for working with us to iron out these last few wrinkles in our setup procedure and documentation for this new checkout method. :^)

[manytrickssw]

No problem, and generally, it's working well ... but I've got a new issue that's just come up: two customers in Canada are unable to use the system. They get this error message on the screen that comes up after entering their basic info (name and address), where they'd normally provide their info:



"Some required information is missing or incorrect. Please correct the fields below and try again.



• Error: An error has occurred. Please contact the system administrator."



Not the most helpful error message :).



I know it's not international in general, because I have orders from other countries in the system already. Any ideas?



thx;

-rob.

[manytrickssw]

Correction: One user gets the above message. The other gets this one:



"There was a problem processing your request. Please press the Back button of your browser and then refresh the page. If you continue to have an issue, please contact us."



In the first case, the user can still see a credit card entry form below their error message; in this case, there's just the error message.



Is there a log somewhere (here or PayPal) that might show what the issues are?



regards,

-rob.

[ellen]

"Error: An error has occurred. Please contact the system administrator." is a PayPal internal error message (as will be anything that shows up above the card info entry form like that). PayPal seems to have had an unusual run of system problems lately; hopefully this was just a temporary problem.



You can see PayPal service problems, at least the ones they're bothering to report, related to the Payflow gateway (problems with which potentially impact both Payments Advanced and Payflow Pro users) here:

https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/site-status/pf-live



The other message ("There was a problem...") sounded to me like one of our messages at first, but checking the verbiage exactly, is also a PayPal system error; one for which I can't speak as to what the problem is either >.>



We do have logs, but a quick look through them turned up zero standard error responses. My feeling is these both the messages your buyers have seen are related to the payflow gateway flakiness over the last couple of days. However, if you want to file a ticket and send us some specific data on users so that we can look up what we have in the logs on those attempts, we'd be happy to do so.

[manytrickssw]

Thanks for looking into it; seems it's on PayPal's side. I'll have my customers try again and see what happens. If it still fails, I'll bring it up with PayPal.



-rob.

[manytrickssw]

Unfortunately, the same users -- and others now -- are reporting the same problem with their purchase attempts; nothing has changed in the last week. The only common thread is that they're all non-US buyers.



Who do I go to to help resolve this issue?



thanks;

-rob.

[E-junkie_Guru]

None of the issues we've seen have been due to our backend integration for PayPal Payments Advanced; any problems have been a matter of either misconfiguration in the seller's settings at our end or in their PayPal Manager (which granted may have been due to omissions in our help page which we've now corrected), or sporadic glitches at PayPal's end for which we have no insight or control.



If you're still seeing any checkout problems using PayPal Advanced, first double-check that you've completed every step of our integration procedure for that service correctly (http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced-shopping-cart.htm), then if you've verified that's all good, contact PayPal support to bring the matter to their attention.

[manytrickssw]

I've confirmed we're configured exactly as shown in the documents, so I guess it's off to PayPal to see what they have to say.



thanks;

-rob.

[cynthia]

I also currently use PayPal Payments Pro and would like to change to PayPal Advanced since they seem identical per your demo listed at the beginning of this chain. But I don't want to make the change until the PayPal Advanced integration with eJunkie is fully vetted It's much too risky for my business. Is there any way to provide updates via this thread on the status of the integration? I'd love to save $25 a month but not at the risk of losing sales.



Cynthia

[E-junkie_Guru]

Our integration with PayPal Payments Advanced is complete, correct, and fully functional at our end, and this has been verified multiple times investigating the issues reported here, so any glitches at this point can only be coming from PayPal's end. Unfortunately, we don't have any special access to "insider information" about internal issues at PayPal's end, so we wouldn't have any news about that we could post here.



You can check PayPal's Site Status Updates page to keep informed of acknowledged issues at their end:

https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/documentation-tools/site-status



E.g., it appears there was an issue at their end with Advanced checkout on Aug. 8-9th:

https://www.x.com/content/resolved-paypal-payments-advanced-merchants-receiving-result-code-5-aug-08



Issues posted there which affect the Payflow gateway might also affect Advanced checkout, which is related to Payflow.



Merchants using PayPal Payments Advanced who encounter any issues with that, once you have double-checked every step of our integration procedure for that, should open a trouble ticket with PayPal Merchant Technical Support (MTS):

https://ppmts.custhelp.com/

[manytrickssw]

I now have an open ticket with PayPal, and they claim there's no evidence of troubles on their part.



They even told me that one of the reported errors ("Error: There was a problem processing your request. Please press the Back button of your browser and then refresh the page. If you continue to have an issue, please contact us.") isn't anything in their system at all -- so if it's not theirs, then whose error is it?



They did ask for some specific user examples, and I've provided five names, email addresses, and failed transaction dates/times for them to look into. But if they come back from that and say there's nothing in their system about those users, doesn't that imply there's something going on between eJunkie and PayPal that's causing a problem?



Note that most transactions are going through, but we're seeing a much higher failure rate (as recently as yesteday) than I would expect. We sell to technically savvy users, too, so I seriously doubt these are user error issues.



I'll let you know what PayPal tells me when they investigate these names.



-rob.

[ellen]

Hi Rob,



That message does indeed come from PayPal; don't let them tell you otherwise. However, I think it's being generated somewhere in their web frontend, before anything gets far enough for them to have a record of it.



Tyson (the Guru) did a little research and came across a mention of something I hadn't considered; after a little testing to confirm, we think that that message is caused by having 3rd-party cookies disabled in the browser; the PayPal iframe in the page apparently needs that functionality to work. This is unfortunate, as it's privacy-hostile and some browsers have those disabled by default.



Do the problem reports you reference specifically list that exact message? We need to know how many of the errors your buyers are experiencing are due to this, vs. potentially some other problem (of which there have been no shortage so far--I've personally had an open ticket with PayPal MTS about my PPA test account being broken for at least the last week, with still no resolution...)



The page as it is currently, including the use of that embedded "template C" iframe for the payment collection, is how we planned out the integration with PayPal's team. We're not sure if switching to just redirecting to template A or B is an option; those both lack the order detail that we're providing, and allow the user to change the address (with no shipping recalculation callback that I'm aware of).



We will be doing some thinking on what, if anything, to do about this. Please keep us updated on how it continues to perform for you.