[Plugin: WP e-Commerce] Paypal Payments Standard 2.0 Stopped Working

Hi Justin!

Feel free to hit me up at justinsainton at gmail dot com. Could be a number of things, I’d be happy to help you debug.

Justin, thanks for posting back to me! I wound up using a premium support token at GetShopped.org and they resolved it for me.

The plugin has been pretty good, up to the checkout page… I have had some major usability issues and have hacked the stock checkout page a lot to resolve issues users were having. I now have it to the point where users don’t seem to be struggling, though the cart abandonment still looks a little high.

One example of a hack I performed is the “same as billing” option, which was causing an issue when users clicked it and then unclicked it (shipping destination couldn’t be subsequently modified). So I just disabled it.

Seems like the checkout page could benefit from some usability love ??

If I have other issues crop up that I can’t resolve, mind if I reach out to you? I’d appreciate it.

Justin

Nice! The support folks at Instinct are really awesome, I’m glad they were able to help out. Curious to hear what the fix was, if nothing else, for the benefit of any others coming across this post.

Would love to hear your usability concerns! I’m probably the biggest critic of the checkout process, and I’m one of the lead developers. The entire checkout process is something we’re looking at heavily in the upcoming release, we’d love to see that run much smoother. Hit me up anytime, whether you have issues, feature requests, usability ideas – I’m all ears!

First of all, congratulations on the plugin and thanks for putting it out there! I know it’s been a lot of work and it’s also come a long way.

I’m *very* glad to hear that you’re on board with fixing the checkout page. Let me see if I can give you my Cliff’s Notes. This is the site: https://bit.ly/3doMu

Main issue is usability, not functionality. Whatever the solution is, it needs to be put through the rounds with a slew of users in a real usability test using many different configurations (i.e. user must be logged in/not). I can see that the functionality is all there. Now it needs to be taken to the next level with a user-centric design and testing process.

Another major issue is the funky mix between page refreshes (“Update” or forced refresh) and AJAX events… very confusing to users. Example: shipping calculator. User must change country, wait for automatic refresh, change state, wait for refresh, enter postal code and press “update.” Then, the user gets a list of shipping options, and I found that users intuitively press “Calculate” after changing the shipping option, causing it to default to the original setting, which was, needless to say, very frustrating. I added the explicit text “(only press after changing postal code),” which seems to have resolved the issue for most users, but this is obviously a pretty ugly hack.

I think the majority of the issues boil down to this: The events that each action fires off are not intuitive for users, and if there’s any page load latency, this issue is exacerbated. Especially with the heavy load that the plugin puts on the server, page load time issues are probably a lot more common than not, and we had to do a lot of work to get the site running like it is right now.

These are the specific problems my users were having:
-Top of form (Review) is not laid out intuitively. Unclear what button to press after changing a field, or what the effect of pressing that button or changing the field would be.
-Coupon code does not change total before tax and shipping (I removed this field and added text “(appears in final total below).”
-Calculate Shipping Price: AJAX and page refresh issue noted above, pressing “update” after changing shipping option issue noted above
-I couldn’t get the display of the subtotals and grand total right below the shipping options to work right. AJAX wasn’t updating grand total in the middle of the page after user changed shipping option. Instead, I added “Subtotals (grand total at bottom of page):” and did some hacking around with the presentation of both the subtotals and the grand total until it worked, but I consider what you see on the page sub-optimal. There should be a grand total underneath the subtotals, which updates, and another grand total at the bottom that also updates. I also found that with the shopping cart widget in the sidebar, the AJAX to refresh the total in the content area didn’t work, so I had to remove the widget.
-“Enter your Email Address” is out of place and a lot of users miss it and get frustrated when the page refreshes because of the error. Many don’t see the error notification. I recommend integrating this with the “Billing/Contact Details” section so it is part of the order flow. I know there are some issues with logged in users on this, but the page should work better for sites that don’t require users to be logged in.
-“Same as Billing” option doesn’t work if someone checks it and then unchecks it… user can’t subsequently modify the Country or State or Province fields.
-In shipping options, country and state populate from the shipping calculator, but postal code doesn’t. The user can change the postal code subsequently, causing problems fulfilling the orders.

Hopefully these notes will help your team in the next iteration of the checkout.

Thanks again for the plugin and keep it up!

Justin

One more thing that just occurred to me is this (which is still unresolved for us):

We’re using Paypal Payments Standard 2.0, which works with one exception: the shipping address instead of the billing address populates into the billing details on the Paypal page. Any thoughts there?

Thanks!

Justin

Ahhh, that’s annoying! I actually was aware of that at one point and thought we patched it. If you look at this link – https://code.google.com/p/wp-e-commerce/source/browse/trunk/wpsc-merchants/paypal-standard.merchant.php#140 – that’s the code that needs to be changed, just from shipping to billing I believe.

I’ll log a ticket for it and get it in the next release.

Thanks for all your other notes, too – great, helpful feedback. Always encouraging. Bookmarked for when we go through the checkout process.

Thank you! I’ll implement that asap.

Justin,

Doesn’t seem to be working quite right (or I misunderstood what I need to change).

Here’s lines 140-141 of paypal-standard.merchant.php

$paypal_vars += array(
			'email' => $this->cart_data['email_address'],
			'first_name' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['first_name'],
			'last_name' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['last_name'],
			'address1' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['address'],
			'city' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['city'],
			'country' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['country'],
			'zip' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['post_code'],
			'state' => $this->cart_data['billing_address']['state'],
		);

The result is that, after the jump to Paypal, the billing first name, last name, and email are the only fields that are auto-filled (but with the right data this time).

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Justin

Sounds like it’s working as it should as far as getting the correct data…the NVP (Name-Value Pairs) for the rest of the info must not be getting loaded by PayPal – this can happen for a variety of frustrating reasons, mostly due to PayPal’s logic, or potentially updated/changed APIs.