Suspected Fraud notices for PayPal transactions

[mdgbv]

I have a friend at PayPal. I'm going to see if he can point me to a way to escalate. This is ridiculous.

[mdgbv]

And why is it not every transaction? It's about half for us right now.

[universalsynergygroup]

Please keep us updates on what your friend at PayPal says. I really hope this can be fixed soon.

[humblepiecomics2020]

This is insane!!!! Have been been going back and fourth all last night and today trying to figure out what is happening!!! Soo glad I checked the forums to see that it wasn't only me!!!!! We're getting hard earned money taken out of our pockets!!! Hope this gets resolved ASAP!!!

[E-junkie_Guru]

We're still only getting vague assurances like this from PayPal MTS when we ask for a status update or ETA:

We are aware of this issue and our engineers are currently working on it. Will let you know once there is an update on the matter.

At this point, we'd like to reiterate a suggestion we made earlier in this thread, during the first time this issue occurred last year:

If you'd like to offer buyers a different checkout method, this help page lists all the payment services we support; any of those will add a separate checkout button in your E-junkie Cart for buyers to pay directly with a card.

If you do this and also want to remove the PayPal checkout option from your E-junkie Cart until they resolve this issue, you can do that in your E-junkie Dashboard under Manage Seller Account > Edit Profile > More Payment Options > Show PayPal in shopping cart (unfortunately that can't be disabled if you're using PayPal Payments Advanced or Pro).

Of those services, we'd recommend Stripe in particular if you're based in any of the countries they support, as they're pretty quick to approve new accounts, very easy to set up with us, and don't even require buyers to enter their card billing address during checkout.

Better yet, if your site loads with an https:// URL and has our cart appearing as an overlay within your own sales pages, our secure checkout screen for card payment can use the same overlay as our cart, which helps reassure buyers for better sales conversions.

[healthyliving101]

For me, Stripe is not an option. Last year they stopped me from using their payment processing service because they claimed that the industry that I am involved (I sell a dietary supplement) has a higher than average level of disputes and chargebacks. even though that has not been the case with my business.

[healthyliving101]

As stated below, PayPal support says their system is not to blame. And we who depend upon PayPal and e-Junkie are caught in the middle:

Please follow up with E-junkie for updates, as this is their integration issue with PayPal and not individual merchants. The issue is with their callback URL. Our developers will be updating them directly of outcome. Thank you for your patience and I hope you have a great weekend!

Sincerely,

Jeremy
Global Technical Support
PayPal, Inc.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Sorry to hear you're getting the runaround from PayPal. Evidently their right hand doesn't know what their left hand is doing, so every MTS ticket anyone opens about it is getting treated as a separate, isolated issue with little if any context relating it to other pertinent tickets, rather than instances of a single, common issue at their end.

At least that "Jeremy" seemed to be aware of a "callback URL" issue they'd mentioned in a related ticket, which we'd already responded to as a red herring -- they were saying our callback URL didn't return any shipping options, but that was a case where the seller they'd tested with doesn't even sell any physical goods that require shipping, so of course no shipping rates were returned in that scenario, where (until this issue arose) they'd heretofore always applied the precalculated tax amount we passed to checkout in the first place.

I don't know if responding to your own MTS ticket would do any good, but if you do, it may help to reference our own MTS case # 10167138, where PayPal has confirmed the issue at their end that they're working to fix and been escalated at their end.

[universalsynergygroup]

It's unbelievable how long this is taking to fix. Every order we receive now shipping is not being charged. We are losing so much money because of this. Would this happen if we were using PayPal buttons and not ejunkie? this really needs to get sorted ASAP.

[E-junkie_Guru]

PayPal is being cagey about exactly why or how the problem is happening, so we have no way of knowing whether their own purchase buttons would be affected or not.

[universalsynergygroup]

Something weird is happening now. All orders are without the shipping charge and the weird thing is that now ejunkie is no longer saying suspected fraud it just shows like a normal sale but still the shipping is not added. Are you guys sure that this has nothing to do with ejunkie?

[healthyliving101]

I received another sale today and the email message that I received from E-Junkie contained the words "Suspected Fraud" and the buyer was not billed for shipping just like before.

[E-junkie_Guru]

Sorry about that @universalsynergygroup -- our Devs briefly attempted a workaround last night that should have allowed us to process/log affected orders as normal and email the seller a Suspected Fraud notification when tax/shipping was unpaid, but that didn't work out as expected, so they promptly rolled that back and went back to the proverbial drawing board.

[universalsynergygroup]

I appreciate you guys still trying to fix this problem. We really need to get this resolved ASAP as 99% of all sales we are receiving now shipping is not added and its costing us too much.

[healthyliving101]

I just a received another sale today and, in this case, my customer was charged for the cost of shipping. The one difference from earlier sales was that this one also required a charge for sales tax. I don't know if that had anything to do with the fact that the shipping cost was also billed properly.

[valerioquatrano]

I agree. It's very annoying. I am having the same issue

[E-junkie_Guru]

Yes, the issue is sporadic, affecting only some transactions but not others, which has made it challenging for us and PayPal to troubleshoot.

We and a few clients did some testing that -- at least as far as we could tell from our limited test-sample sizes at the times we tested -- seemed to suggest occurrence of the issue might correlate with the following conditions:

• Buyer chose to fund the payment from their PayPal account balance, rather than from a linked card or bank account;
  ...and/or...
• Buyer clicked a link on the PayPal checkout site to view available shipping methods, but then neglected to manually select the sole shipping method available there*, yet PayPal let them go ahead and finish checkout anyway.

*Since we can already offer a choice of shipping methods (if the seller sets those up) in our cart before checkout, we only transmit the buyer's sole selected shipping method and rate to PayPal checkout, so there's only ever one method/rate available there.

That said, we don't know if those tentative findings would remain consistent across a larger volume of transactions, or if those tests just happened to coincide with PayPal tweaking things at their end that may have caused those results only temporarily, as they remain cagey about discussing any particulars whatsoever. We have at least reported those findings to PayPal in our MTS ticket about the issue.

[healthyliving101]

Thank you for contacting PayPal Merchant Technical Support. We recently responded to your case. This is a courtesy email to inform you that your case will be closing shortly. However, you can keep the case open by replying with any new details or create a new ticket in the future.

Case Number: 10224177
Subject: Guest checkout deducts shipping cost for all guest buyers
Date Created: February 17, 2022

[E-junkie_Guru]

If you want to keep your own PayPal MTS ticket open in addition to ours, you could just followup on that to reference our own MTS case # 10167138, which has been escalated and is currently set to "On Hold - Internal" status pending further action or updates from PayPal.

[universalsynergygroup]

Are there any updates?