Customer Can't Pay Using Paypal!

I just had a customer contact me saying he couldn’t pay using his Paypal account. He’s receiving an error, stating “Missing or invalid Security Code. Please try again.”

I tried changing

captcha="clean"

to

captcha="0"

and it’s still not working.

Please help!

I thought I resolved this but now my customer is receiving the following error, “Error #36. Transaction failed: Fail to obtain approval for the online transaction”

He is trying to pay using his Paypal account.

I tried registering to my site using one of my Paypal accounts, and it worked.

Why would my customer’s account not be working??

Hi Dean,

Sorry to hear you’re having trouble.

Are you using Recurring Billing with PayPal Payflow?

There has been a report similar to this one in the past, you can see what Jason said here.

If you could also send over your PayPal Logs from the transaction, x-ing out personal data (if you have logging enabled), that would be great. You should be able to find the logs from within /wp-content/plugins/s2member-logs/

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Sorry you’re having these issues, PayPal has been updating it’s API and different users have different APIs based on the time they joined PayPal. As mentioned by Jason in the linked post, it may be in your best interest to contact PayPal and ask them about the error.

Thanks

I just enabled the logging. Is there a way where I can look up what the user’s Paypal e-mail address is (without having to ask user) so I can ask Paypal support to look into the issue?

Hi Dean,

Is there a way where I can look up what the user’s Paypal e-mail address is (without having to ask user) so I can ask Paypal support to look into the issue?

Unfortunately s2Member does not store this information anywhere other than the logs, and since logging was disabled you would have to ask the customer.

However, I don’t see why PayPal would need the customer’s PayPal email address, because the issue is between s2Member and your PayPal account.

OK, I’ll ask Paypal.

The reason I thought I would need to specify the user’s Paypal account is because I successfully registered for the site using my personal Paypal account. I thought it might be something that’s user-specific.

Your saying that Paypal should be able to see the error in my Payflow account’s history?

Hi Dean,

Your saying that Paypal should be able to see the error in my Payflow account’s history?

The issue seems to be brought up by the time your PayPal account was created, because PayPal has been updating it’s API, different users have different standards to follow, which can lead to issues when s2Member’s contacting PayPal and PayPal is set up to take different variables. PayPal should be able to fix the problem by upgrading the version of the API they’re using on your specific PayPal account.

I would suggest emailing them the error you’re getting, and the below link for information regarding the issue, if you cannot get it resolved using the tips Jason lined up within the post:

http://www.s2member.com/forums/topic/urgent-error-36-transaction-failed/#post-22378

Let me know how it goes :)