WooCommerce & PayPal Sandbox Error

I have an online store that I have been running for several years

The store uses WooCommerce with the default PayPal Basic Gateway.

Every time I add a new product, I do a test transaction in the PayPal sandbox.

The last time I did a successful sandbox transaction was in August 2015. This week I tried one for a new product, and it failed. No matter how many times I try, the transaction fails. By fail, I mean that PayPal claims it went through successfully, but WooCommerce does not receive a confirmation acknowledgment from PayPal and therefore leaves the order in ‘pending’ mode. Eventually, after a day, the pending order switches itself to ‘cancelled’ as it did not ever receive a confirmation from PayPal. All live orders still work. No updates have been done on my end. The WooCommerce, WordPress, PHP version they are all the same. Nothing has changed since Aug 2015. The only changes I can see affecting this are PayPal’s SHA-256 update.

Many people are saying that it looks like WooCommerce is no longer receiving IPN confirmation from PayPal. Some have said this is due to the new SHA-256 implementation from PayPal which has already been added to the Sandbox but not the live site. This might explain why my transactions fail in the sandbox but not the live site. However, PayPal support says that’s probably not the issue because they see the sandbox transaction going through successfully – just not reaching my WooCommerce store.

Others have said that is sounds like IPN is failing.

I also found a WooCommerce document that describes almost exactly what is happening to me and says it is due to the SHA-256: https://docs.woothemes.com/document/paypal-update-for-sha-256/?utm_source=support%20website&utm_medium=woothemes%20referral&utm_campaign=standard%20links&utm_content=/knowledge-base/article/woocommerce/troubleshooting/paypal-update-for-sha256&utm_term=https://support.woothemes.com/hc/en-us/articles/206495235-Paypal-Update-for-SHA-256

I don’t know if this has anything to do with it but I am posting it to be thorough.

My experience with all this is somewhat limited but my store is broken and I need to get it fixed. I’d appreciate any help and would like to say in advance that I am grateful and very much enjoy WooCommerce. I’m sure others have also started experiencing this issue if it is PayPal related.

Thank you

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