Increased in failed orders

Hi @chynnad,

The error MERCHANT_NOT_ENABLED_FOR_REFERENCE_TRANSACTION should not be visible on the frontend so it’s rather unusual for a buyer to see this message.
Instead, this message should be printed in the log files when you are attempting to use a vaulted payment method from a buyer for example for a subscription renewal payment while Reference Transactions are not enabled for your account.

Automatic renewal payments for PayPal accounts only work with Reference Transactions enabled: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#subscriptions-faq
But outside of the application for automatic subscription payments, Reference Transactions are mostly irrelevant for one-time purchases and I’m not seeing why this error would occur for the buyer while being present.

Could you please check if “Logging” is enabled in the plugin settings?
We are interested in a copy of your plugin log files and your WooCommerce system report.

You can share these either here in the forums or better privately with us from here:
https://paypal.inpsyde.com/docs/request-support/
If you send a private message, please include a link to this thread.
Thanks!

Kind regards,
Niklas

Hi Niklas,

We currently have logging turned on for the plugin and the MERCHANT_NOT_ENABLED_FOR_REFERENCE_TRANSACTION error is only showing on the customer’s end and not in the logs.

I went ahead and submit the logs and the WooCommerce system report on your site.

Best,
Chynna

Hello @chynnad

just updating this thread as well that we are investigating this issue, but it is a hard case, since the RT should not affect payments like they are in your case.

We will update this thread once we get to a solution or clear cause of this issue. (Currently working internally with you on PPC-625).

Kind regards,
Joost

Thank you for working on this for me. I’ll continue to follow up with you in our email thread as well.

Best,
Chynna

Just an FYI that I recently updated to 1.9.0 and I’ve already got 2 customer reports of seeing the “MERCHANT_NOT_ENABLED_FOR_REFERENCE_TRANSACTION” on the front end and not being able to process their transactions.

Looking at my orders, I see another 3 failed Paypal orders (which is pretty rare thing to see). I’ve reverted to 1.8.1 and hopefully my customers will be able to complete their transactions.

Olivier

Hello Olivier,

thanks for adding here. Please let me know if you see any of the reference transaction failures with version 1.8.1. We would like to get confirmed if this issue was introduced with release 1.9.0, so we have a starting point for our investigation. We only have sandbox accounts available for testing and these accounts always have Reference Transactions activate, so it is hard for us to do any testing on this issue.

Any further details will be appreciated!

Kind regards,
Joost

Hi Joost,

I did revert to 1.8.1 and had no more reports of issues (huge sale so there were 200+ Paypal transactions from around the world within a few days).

After reverting to 1.8.1, two customers who had issues were able to complete their transactions without issues (the others either used a CC or I lost the sale).

Best regards,
Olivier

Hello,

It has been quite some time since our last communication, so we will mark this thread as resolved. Please open a new thread if you are still facing issues or have questions that you need us to answer.

Kind regards,
Andreas