Stalled PayPal Transactions

#1

A user on my site has reported a problem: She clicks on the button on my site to renew her membership. This takes her to PayPal so that she can pay. She clicks there on PayPal’s “Pay Now” button. What should happen next is that PayPal ought to process the transaction and show her a webpage confirming that it succeeded. However, what she keeps encountering is a page that only gives her the option to cancel. Something appears to be stalling out, but I don’t know what or why.

Many other users are able to renew their memberships without encountering this problem.

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thanks,

  • David.
#2

Try to repeat the problem yourself, in her account. There should be some clue…

#3

Okay, so I reset the user’s password (so that I would know the password) and then logged in as the user on my site. Upon clicking on the link to go to PayPal, that worked fine. I then logged in to PayPal with my own credentials and proceeded to with the next click (on the Pay Now button). This is the point at which the user has reported trouble. For me, the transaction was successfully processed, and within my site the user’s membership was successfully extended by a year. So I find that I am unable to re-create the problem that the user reported. At this point I’m suspecting that it is either a bug inside PayPal or it is in some way connected with the user’s account at PayPal, neither of which I can fix.

Incidentally, however, when I subsequently logged in to PayPal with the credentials for my site and then issued a refund for the payment that was incurred above (i.e., the payment made against my personal credit card), although the refund got issued, over on my site the user’s membership extension was not undone. I will manually undo the one-year membership extension, but I wonder if this should have been automatic?

Thanks,

  • David.