paypal is the most popular in the online business.



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

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.

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. :^)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 (1http://www.e-junkie.com/ej/paypal-payments-advanced-shopping-cart.htm1), then if you've verified that's all good, contact PayPal support to bring the matter to their attention.

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.

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

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):

1https://ppmts.custhelp.com/1

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.

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.

Unfortunately, only one user reported that exact error message. The rest were just along the lines of "it didn't accept my credit card."



I'll ask these folks to try with third-party cookies enabled to see what happens; thanks for finding that tidbit. I'll post back with any results.



-rob.

OK, the third-party cookies issue definitely helped a couple of our users ... but it's a major flaw in the system, for at least a huge percentage of our prospective customers.



We sell software to Mac users, and Safari is the dominant browser on the Mac -- very dominant. And unfortunately for us in this case, it defaults to disabling third-party cookies. That means that a very high percentage of our credit card purchase attempts will fail; probably much higher than those on other browsers.



*** EDIT: Chrome also blocks third-party cookies by default, and it seems IE 10 will do so, too -- not sure about IE 9. That means only Firefox ships with them enabled, and I would guess that will be changing soon, given the others' defaults. ***



Given that this issue is on the fatfreecartpro page, can you at least put up a big obvious warning box, explaining that users will have to allow third-party cookies, in order for the transaction to work? Ideally, this warning would contain a link that led to an explanation on how to do that in the major browsers, too.



But this is just a short-term fix suggestion; long term, using third-party cookies isn't acceptable, due to the security issues. If e-Junkie can't improve this process, we're going to have to figure out another way to accept credit cards (does this same issue exist with PayPal Pro?) ... and that would probably mean we'd need to start looking for a different cart solution, as we can't mix two systems together on our checkout page.



We've been very happy with e-Junkie thus far, and would hate to have to leave ... but we can't have a credit card system (where users are sometimes rightfully cautious to begin with) that requires a user to change a default browser setting



-rob.

I just heard back from PayPal on my open ticket there, and here's what they had to say:



"That makes sense, but there would not be any way around that. The iFrame is going to be using PayPal's domain not yours or eJunkie's. That means the particular method that eJunkies is using is not going to work by default for a lot of browsers going forward. They will either have to not use the iFrame and direct customers to PayPal for the checkout with Layout A or B in the Hosted Checkout. "



So is there a way for us to not rely on third-party cookies, given that most major browsers are now disabling them by default?



-rob.

Any update on this issue? I'm still getting multiple daily emails from customers unable to purchase our apps; I have a stock reply I now send, explaining how to enable third party cookies ... but this is horrid from a customer perspective.



thanks;

-rob.

Hi Rob,



After poking at what we could do about this (and me being out sick for a week), we've switched to just redirecting to PayPal's payment form, rather than including it as an iframe in out own detail page. This solves the 3rd-party cookie issue for now, at the expense of not being able to show order summary detail on the payment page. It's not the user experience we had planned when we developed the integration with PayPal, but at least it's not turning away customers because of browser issues.

Sorry to hear you were sick, but glad the non-response here wasn't a sign of ignoring the problem :).



I realize this isn't an ideal solution for you guys, but for me, it appears to be much better -- they'll still see the details after they pay, and will no longer get kicked out for (what to them are) mysterious reasons.



thanks!

-rob.