Take care if you…

Hi there,

We’re genuinely sorry to hear about your difficulties with the PayPal Payments plugin. It’s our goal to offer a seamless and beneficial experience to all users, and we regret to hear this was not your experience.

It’s quite peculiar to hear about inconsistencies in the plugin’s performance across different sites; this is certainly uncommon and not something we hear about frequently. We’re always here to resolve any issues promptly and efficiently, and our support team is ready to assist with any unexpected difficulties you might be facing.

Unfortunately, we haven’t received any direct communication or specific details from you regarding the issues encountered, as direct interaction enables us to offer precise assistance and rectify any problems swiftly.

If you are willing, please consider contacting us directly or providing more details about the errors encountered in our support forums. We’re here to understand and address your needs better to improve the experience for all users.

We value your feedback and continually strive to enhance the PayPal Payments experience. For those seeking more advanced features and robust functionality, our plugin and support team stand ready to assist and enhance your experience. We invite you to revisit PayPal Payments anytime you find your alternative solution lacking functionality.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. What matters most to us is that you find a solution that suits your needs, and we are here to ensure your satisfaction should you choose to rely on PayPal Payments in the future.

Kind regards,
Niklas

Well, thanks for getting back – this shows that you value every opinion and experience and take it seriously. So let me explain a bit what I did, just to value your answer.

Regarding not opening a ticket or contacting you upfront is just because I do not want everybody to look into the backend of my sites – so I tried to fix these uncommon errors.

To sum this up: I have been connected to Paypal, I made some earlier payments using this plugin, but suddenly it stopped working. Other payment options like for example Stripe are working as expected.

So I switched off the connection, re-established it again and tried another payment using Paypal. No luck – I got a random error message that the payment failed, something like “Order could not be retrieved. Perhaps it has already been completed or this browser is not supported. Please check your email or try again with a different browser. PayPalGateway.php:547 Order status changed from Payment Pending to Failed.” (Translated, site in German language). This error message can be found in the backend and orders, but as well the checkout is not redirecting to Paypal but just gives this (or a similar) error message on the checkout page – I made no screenshot.

Anyway, I enabled debugging, I checked the server logs, and none gave me any hint. I tried developer tools to check any issues with js files and maybe CORS, nothing to see here.

I compared a preview of both sites, the one where it is working, and that where it is not. On one (the working one) I see the button is changing from normal state to Paypal payment button, once I chose the payment option. On the other it is not.

I disabled plugins one after the other, to check if there is any issue and conflict. No change. I checked the Woocommerce and plugin settings on both sites, no differences. It is strange because both sites are almost identical whereas I am using Elementor on the one which is working, whereas I use Gutenberg editor on the other.

I tried to add the api endpoints to the whitelist, and I got a response for the webhooks. I even tested them, they worked, and gave me a 200 response.

So the main differnce on both side IMHO is just that the button is not switching to Paypal button. But as I am not getting any idea of what is wrong here I finally gave up fixing this.

Now, after selecting another Paypal payment plugin it immediately worked like a charm. Payments worked again. ??

Re your question to contact you directly: I do not want to open a support ticket, but you are right: I could have used a Sandbox account to test payments first – which I did not. I used a live connection whereas the logs are saying: reference transactions enabled, webhooks refresh worked, and all that stuff. Both sites on same machine, both have the Php version.

So everything looks good – except th button change does not happen. This is weird. And a Sandbox account would not fix that – would it?

Maybe that information helps a bit, and honestly I am really sorry to just give you 1 star – as you normally do really great stuff and contribute a lot. Thanks for your great work. But this payment plugin drives me nuts.

In addition to what I mentioned above: I downgraded the plugin to 2.2.2 which is not working (same behavior) and the to 2.0.0 – which is…

Hurray… working

• This reply was modified 1 year, 1 month ago by Chris. Reason: Additional information, last two paragraphs

Looks like something has changed between version 2.0.0 and 2.2.2 and you may try to find out what.

Hi @christian-martens

Thanks for the feedback. I’m glad you found at least a temporary solution with an older plugin version. We understand the importance of payment processing for your shop and are here to provide any assistance you may need.

The Could not retrieve order error you mentioned could happen for various reasons. But one of the more frequent causes is when the PayPal buttons fail to replace the “Place order” button, just like you described. At this time, PayPal Payments relies on the PayPal smart buttons for the payment processing. That’s why there is an error when the buttons fail to load. The team is looking into fallback options for better compatibility.

In most cases, behavior like this can result from underlying plugin conflicts (e.g. when using a page builder checkout widget or multiple WooCommerce shortcodes on the same page). You can find more information about this issue and basic troubleshooting information in the GitHub wiki here.

I would also like to stress that nobody intends to connect to your site. Instead, the goal of a support ticket is to provide you with the most effective guidance to put you in a position that allows you to resolve potential problems yourself.
But to do so, our team most often needs more details, such as a link to the website to observe the frontend behavior, or better a copy of the WooCommerce system report, which generally is more suitable for a private support ticket vs. a public forum.

Speaking about the forum, we must ask for your understanding to post any questions in the dedicated plugin support forums or privately from here, as we must adhere to the website guidelines and are not supposed to provide support in reviews. We hope to hear from you in the dedicated support channels, as our team is happy to help. Thank you!

Kind regards,
Niklas

I can understand that Paypal’s smart buttons cause some headaches – and I think that “The team is looking into fallback options for better compatibility.” is the best approach.

I would edit my review a bit and hope you will get this fallback soon.

Best Chris