Paypal Pro (PayFlow Ed.) and Express Checkout

Hi Guys,

I know there’s a lot of threads about this already, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading them and a lot of time talking to Paypal reps about this, but I need to run this past you if I may. I apologise for the length of this – it’s got me all tangled up.

We have S2Member Pro and Paypal Pro (PayFlow Ed.) and will be selling subscriptions with a yearly renewal. We are Australian-based and will be catering to a world-wide audience. Ideally we want credit card transactions on the site, a Paypal option would be nice but not essential.

All the PayPal credentials have been entered into the S2Member backend and a Pro form on the site. I can successfully transact a credit card payment but get the Error #1 message with the PayPal option, i.e.:

Error #1. User authentication failed: 11452-Merchant not enabled for reference transactions. Please contact PayPal Merchant Technical Support (www.paypal.com/mts) and request `Recurring Billing` service, and also ask to have `Reference Transactions` enabled for Recurring Billing via Express Checkout.

We’re in regular contact with 2 reps from Paypal a number of times both pre-sales and post-error, one from Sales, the other in Tech Support. Sales advice is that we either have only credit card payment available on the site and remove Express Checkout support, or send all customers offsite to Paypal to process the transaction, we can’t have both (from what I understand this will be the same even if Reference Transactions are approved for Express?). Tech Support pretty much said the same thing, saying to remove the Paypal option from the Pro Form. I can see that in several places you state that 1) Paypal requires that option to be there, and 2) S2Member doesn’t allow Paypal to be removed from the Pro form – I had read this since last talking to both of them so I didn’t get the chance to bring it up with them, but I can see their advice coming back to ‘either remove the Express Checkout or send everyone back to Paypal’.

I have to claim a good deal of ignorance and a great deal of confusion when it comes to Paypal’s products and where the line is with each of them and what the discrete products can and can’t do. After reading through a great deal of forum entries and documentation I can say that I have a huge amount of faith in the S2Member development team and am not considering the fact that you would set up a system that simply couldn’t be processed by Paypal (i.e. bundling PayPal Pro and Express Checkout), and I figure that the workaround is something quite simple that either isn’t being communicated well by PayPal, or I am simply not absorbing well enough in my own mind. The documentation asks that reference transactions be enabled by PayPal – it seems they are saying that this has been done for Pro (PayFlow ed.) but not Express Checkout and there would be some problem with this.

At this stage I’m not even sure I can distill this down into a specific question for you. Reading through what I’ve written, is there anything that immediately jumps out at you that says I’ve missed or misinterpreted anything? It seems that a very simple set of steps needed to be done, but there is a lot of resistance from Paypal to getting them done.

I’m still in contact with PayPal about this, which is going around in circles. If you can see through my novel and offer any advice that would be greatly appreciated.

I am getting this exact same problem!!

Error #1. User authentication failed: 11452-Merchant not enabled for reference transactions. Please contact PayPal Merchant Technical Support (www.paypal.com/mts) and request `Recurring Billing` service, and also ask to have `Reference Transactions` enabled for Recurring Billing via Express Checkout.

On my test order form here:

http://secureorderalexalbright.com/covercreator/1-3/

Any help would be greatly greatly appriciated.

Been working on this for hours….

Thanks.

PS: I HAVE reoccurring billing with PayPay flow as well.

It’s not your fault to be confused when it comes to this, PayPal has taken care of causing this in most of us…

s2Member’s pro-form can have the PayPal option, it’s worked for years together with the PayPal Pro card options. Recently PayPal made some changes on their side and that’s where your trouble is coming from.

The error you quoted says: “Please contact PayPal Merchant Technical Support (www.paypal.com/mts) and request `Recurring Billing` service, and also ask to have `Reference Transactions` enabled for Recurring Billing via Express Checkout.” Did you do that?

Jason said:
The next maintenance release (v130510) is going to cause many site owners to start getting this error whenever Express Checkout is selected as a Payment Option, and they are integrated with Payflow Edition Recurring Billing.

You now are required to contact PayPal and request both:
Recurring Billing service and Reference Transactions too.

This doesn’t cost anything, but it’s a vetted process, and a site owner must request it. Also, it has to be enabled on both their PayPal.com account, and also on their account at manager.paypal.com. For most Payflow Edition site owners, simply calling PayPal MTS (or submitting a ticket) will suffice. See: http://www.paypal.com/mts

A site owner can enable this at manager.paypal.com on their own. See: [hilite path]manager.paypal.com -> Security Settings -> Reference Transactions[/hilite]

However, that’s only one part of it, and the PayPal.com account has no such UI. Thus, a site owner must contact PayPal MTS to resolve this if they would like to implement Recurring Billing under the Payflow API and make it compatible with Express Checkout.

I hope that helps!

Hi Cristián, Paypal have confirmed that there is a request to have Reference Transactions approved in progress. Recurring billing had been enabled prior, so I just need to wait for a response before continuing. I’ll report back here once that’s happened.

Cool.