PayPal duplicated payment

#1

I just had a customer register using a Pro Form checkout page. It appears everything went smoothly, except that PayPal processed payment for the transaction twice within 2 minutes. Only one subscriber account and one recurring billing subscription were created, just the payment was processed twice.

I saw that there had been an issue with Stripe on this, but I didn’t see that anyone has brought it up for PayPal. I was a couple of updates behind (I was running v191022 until I updated it just now), but I didn’t see that anything had been added as a bug fix on this, so I thought I would mention it. In 8 years, this is the first time I’ve seen this happen. I don’t know it’s a fluke, or if something has changed that needs to be addressed.

Thanks for any input!

#2

Thanks for reporting it @amcregulationsummary. @clavaque…looks like PayPal has double charge problem as well as Stripe.

#3

I can say I get at least one or two double charged customers per week?

#4

This is not a new problem. In the many years that I’ve been using s2Member Pro with PayPal, I’ve occasionally seen double payments, usually one or two minutes apart. But it happens very rarely.

My theory is that the person refreshes the payment page, believing it has frozen. Of course, I don’t know for certain. But it happens so rarely, maybe a couple of times a year, that I’ve just accepted it.

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#5

I encounter this problem every so often, including today.

Usually I get a message from a customer who cancelled their membership, informing me that they are still being charged. Upon investigation I discover that yes they did cancel their membership, however the issue is that a duplicate payment profile was setup by PayPal when they first signed up.

For example, today’s customer signed up using a PayPal Pro Form and two accounts were created for him, almost instantaneously, with the second account being created less than a second after the first.

Does anyone have a fix for this?

Duplicates
Duplicates.png2316×296 36.2 KB

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#6

Interesting. I use PayPal and occasionally have a member charged twice, with the second payment charged within a minute of the first payment. I does not happen very often, but it never occurred to me that maybe two profiles were created for the same member. I’ll have to check that out next time it happens.

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#7

I have a feeling that’s usually due to user error, in my experience.

I only saw double charges happening a few times a long time ago where the time difference was close enough to be a system error.

Nowadays, when it happens, the user subscribed twice (maybe because they didn’t understand part of the process or maybe because they weren’t properly redirected or another mistake).

You can always refund them, but it’s annoying PayPal and Stripe won’t refund us the fee, so we’re net negative when it happens and we don’t deduct the fees.

When it happens and I see it’s due to user error I let them know they’ll lose the processing fee because the payment processor doesn’t refund us and it’s all good (or I just give them credit so they don’t lose that amount).

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#8

You’re paying way too much in fees, if your subscriptions are mostly under 10 dollars per payment do yourself a favor and message PayPal saying you want to switch your business/premium account with them for micro transactions plan / fee structure.

That means a different fee model that is more beneficial for small transactions (but less interesting if most of your transactions are above 10 dollars or so).

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