PayPal has been experiencing a technical issue that prevents customers from completing transactions on numerous third-party websites that use PayPal to power their checkout buttons. Operators of websites and plug-ins say the problem began as early as June 20. On June 28, a PayPal moderator confirmed the company’s developers were working on a fix. (See update below.)
Reports indicate the problem has impacted users of services including Xenforo, MemberMouse, and E-junkie. (Clearly the problem would be getting more attention if it also impacted sites like eBay and Etsy, which presumably connect with PayPal differently.)
A reader who sells digital products and uses E-junkie for automatic PDF download on their website told EcommerceBytes they only learned of the problem after a customer contacted them to report they were unable to complete the order.
E-junkie has been documenting the problem in a thread on its forums and said PayPal acknowledged the issue at their end on June 22 and assigned developers to resolve it.
People are also discussing it on a thread on the PayPal forums. Some report that while they may get a sporadic transaction come through, their PayPal payments have virtually ceased for the past week.
Some users said they were turning to Stripe to process payments on their websites, including the EcommerceBytes reader who alerted us to the problem. The reader said they would reactivate PayPal when the problem was fixed, “but when that will be, who knows.” They said they were thankful they also sold on Etsy, which has saved them during the past week, despite the high fees they pay to Etsy.
As some people pointed out, despite this issue being widespread, the PayPal Status page shows everything “operational” under Online Checkout.
Update 7/1/2023: A PayPal moderator posted on June 29th that the problem was fixed. He suggested sellers interested in testing it use a card not linked to their account “since merchants can’t process self payments.”
E-junkie confirmed PayPal had fixed the bug and also offered some advice: “If anyone is still getting any buyers reporting the problem behavior, please ask them to try again now. Any remaining buyers still having trouble may just need to clear their browser cache and cookies, to make sure their browser will load the current, fixed version of PayPal’s checkout pages. If that doesn’t resolve the issue for them, please do let us know, so we can pass that along to MTS.”
In the meantime, the problem seemed to have sparked some sellers to discover PayPal’s rival Stripe. A reader told EcommerceBytes, “PayPal has finally fixed the problem and I will turn it back on but I am now a big Stripe fan.” And a seller wrote on the PayPal thread:
“I was having problems with both guest checkout as well as PayPal checkout. The work-around with the shipping address option seemed to work for a few people that had contacted me about their checkout failures. Unknown if it’s working for everyone. So, I signed up for Stripe this morning. And with Ejunkie’s clear instructions was able to easily integrate it as a payment option in my shopping cart. I’m not tech savvy but the whole process took me only about 15 minutes. Easy. I can breathe a little easier now having that second pay option. Not happy with PayPal right now. I’ll never know how much business I lost by customers getting frustrated with the checkout failures. If I didn’t have a working business loan through them, I would ditch them completely.”
