PayPal issues

We’re trying to get this plugin working with PayPal, but the user experience is a disaster. I don’t know what can be done on our side to try and improve it, so I’m deferring to your superior knowledge.

Some of the issues we’ve found thus far;

1. Attempting to check out using a UK credit card doesn’t give the option of settling in GBP. It gives the option of USD which was neither the currency that user was shopping in, nor the currency of their card. This is enough to kill a sale.

2. When the user is first directed to PayPal, the language changes from the language they were browsing in to the language of the country they’re in. In my case I was testing this from Thailand and the entire PayPal page rendered in Thai; a language I cannot read. Thai is not the language I was shopping in, nor is it a preferred browser language in my browser. Again, this is a conversion killer. People will not stay on a page in a language that they cannot read.

3. When a user changes their country, the language changes. I tried assuming the role of an English person in the UK, paying with a UK credit card, but sending to a friend in Greece, and suddenly everything switched to Greek. Again; a language that I cannot read and is neither the language I was shopping in, nor a preferred browser language.

4. Telephone number is mandatory, but doesn’t allow me to enter a phone number from another country. In the example above, I could not use my UK number; it would only accept a number with a Greek country code.

5. Cards not accepted. I’ve created a dummy card that I’ve been able to use for the most vanilla of transactions. It’s a UK card and with a UK address seems to work. However with a US address, I get “We weren’t able to add this card.?Check all the details are correct and try again or try a different card.”.

Is there anything that we can do to stop PayPal from screwing up these transactions? It seems to me that if we pass PayPal the currency and locale that the user has been shopping in, that this should be honored.

We are using WPML for multi-language and Woocommerce Multi-language for multi-currency. This has been working for us for years using Woocommerce’s core PayPal standard with customers able to pay in their preferred currency etc. Recently it’s stopped working properly, so we’ve been looking for a better integration.

Your plugin seems to offer a better experience with the pop-up rather than a redirect, but as it stands, we cannot us this.

Ideally we’d do all this in an iframe on site with language and currency honored. Any suggestions appreciated. Even “PayPal is crap; pick a different gateway” would be valid feedback.