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iowacpr
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August 23, 2019 at 2:48 pm
I’m using PayPal Express with Smart Buttons and, after using EE for about a year and a half, a brand new issue just started popping up. A few customers have received a “technical error” message and when I look at the transaction details on their account the Gateway Response is “PayPal did not respond with the expected parameters.”
I contacted PayPal and these transactions don’t appear to be even getting to them, so I’m curious if you’ve seen this before or if there are some logs I can dig into.
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Tony
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August 23, 2019 at 3:34 pm
Hi there,
We’ve seen this a couple of times but in both cases, it was intermittent and in short, looked like PayPal was returning either 504 or 500 errors for the request EE sent them.
You could then repeat the exact same payment a few minutes later and it worked, meaning it was likely server issues on PayPal’s side…. not to bash PayPal but its rare they’ll admit any issues on their end and it must be on your server.
EE create payment logs in Event Espresso -> Payment methods -> Logs
Search for the ID of a transaction this happened on and you should see multiple log entries, click the log entry ID on the left to view each entry (Don’t click on th TXN ID on the right, that takes you to the transaction itself, not the Log entry).
See any errors there?
Also if you open a transaction this happened on, what do you see in the ‘Gateway response’ field of the payment shown there?
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Josh
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August 23, 2019 at 3:43 pm
Hi,
You could also check with the customers (or possibly the transaction details info listed in the individual transaction in Event Espresso > Transctions) to find out which browser they’re using. For example if they’re using an older browser that doesn’t 100% support the JavaScript used on your site, then there may have been a JavaScript error somewhere on your checkout page. Which could interfere with the gateway. The PayPal Express w/Smart buttons gateway uses JavaScript to pass the payment amount information to PayPal.
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iowacpr
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August 23, 2019 at 4:04 pm
This reply has been marked as private.
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iowacpr
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August 23, 2019 at 4:31 pm
I’m now more convinced that this is an EE/server problem and not PayPal. I switched to Stripe and a customer successfully made their transaction but then the confirmation emails didn’t send. I looked at the messages and noticed there were almost 30 in the Queued for Sending. This happened yesterday as well and I deactivated and reactivated EE and it resolved the issue, but now that it’s happened twice and I’m having these PayPal issue it seems to point to a recurring problem.
With this latest occurance I deactivated and reactivated and the messages are still sitting in Queued for Sending. When I try to manually push them through I get this error:
An error has occurred:
No message was sent because of problems with sending. Either all the messages you selected were not a sendable message, they were ALREADY sent on a different scheduled task, or there was an error. If there was an error, you can look at the messages in the message activity list table for any error messages.
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iowacpr
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August 24, 2019 at 8:15 am
Sorry for the multiple posts, but I wanted to update you.
I replicated the issue myself with PayPal Express with Smart Buttons. I then switched to PayPal Payments Pro (onsite) and the issue no longer exists. This obviously doesn’t solve the underlying issue, but my site is at least functional.
The main problem I have now is that my messages keep giving me errors when they’re trying to send. They’re all stuck in queued. Using WP Mail Logging, I’ve looked at the mail log and these queued messages aren’t showing up in the log at all. I’ve deleted the relevant cron events and deleted all of the messages and I’m getting the same issue when I regenerate the messages. I’ve also deactivated and reactivated EE with no luck. I also contacted my host and had them look for php errors which they found none of.
So, the good news is that I can accept payments for registrations. The bad news is that my messages aren’t being sent out and they are unfortunately critical to my business. Any help would be appreciated.
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iowacpr
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August 25, 2019 at 7:35 am
Hey Tony,
I see that you’re doing some testing. The emails started successfully sending again last night when I would manually push them through, however they wouldn’t automatically send. Your test registration and a real registration came at the same time this morning and those emails didn’t send either. I deactivated and reactivated EE and the emails sent, so at this point it seems like it’s working with the exception of the PayPal Express with Smart Buttons payment method.
One thing I noticed each time was that the emails stopped sending after an unsuccessful payment attempt with the PayPal payment method. I’d look in the email queue and and the first unsuccessful message would be a “Receipt” queued up with no other info. After that, all future emails queued up and wouldn’t send.
I’m not sure what the issue is/was but PayPal Pro and PayPal Express (offsite) are working properly at this time.
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Tony
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August 27, 2019 at 4:42 am
Hi there,
No need to apologize for the multiple posts, we prefer more info than not enough so please feel free to add additional posts/details whenever you have them in any of your threads 🙂
So the problem with the PayPal payment is the payment_id value is missing and that value (as the name likely gives away) is required for it to work.
Whilst I’ve been investing this, I can’t reproduce this on my test sites. I have multiple different sites running PayPal Smart Buttons and I can’t reproduce this on any of them so it’s a little difficult to track down.
May I ask what the exact steps you are taking to reproduce this with PayPal Smart Buttons on your site?
I’m assuming the norm of clicking to pay (but which button specifically on the payment method?), adding your details, authorizing the payment and then waiting for EE to direct you to the thank you page (which doesn’t happen because you get the above error)?
The reason I ran a quick test registration was to see if your site had any JS errors on the page (I didn’t see any), the odd part of this the 4 values in billing_info are all null until the payment has been authorized, at which point the smart buttons JS updates the fields. That’s obviously happening as you have 3 of those 4 values but no payment_id breaks everything after that.
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