Sandbox mode can't purchase

Not able to complete transaction – I get an error saying “The link you have used to enter the PayPal system is invalid. Please review the link and try again.” This occurs only when attempting to purchase the premium membership.

• This topic was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by  Ron Smith.
• This topic was modified 4 years, 3 months ago by  Raam Dev. Reason: Moved to Community Forum (not Pre-Sale question)

Technical support question, not Pre-Sale (wrong forum).

Moving this thread into Community Forum so you have a chance to receive assistance from other site owners. If you’d like priority support from s2Member®, please re-post this topic in our Customer Support Forum and we’ll take a closer look for you.

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You may like to try this, as this was a problem I had at first.

In the PayPal Sandbox mode you will have a different PayPal generated account holder email address. (normally something like your normal one, but with numbers added.) Make sure that in your s2Member set up configuration for PayPal that you use this sandbox email, and not your normal paypal account email.

Hope that works for you.

PAF :)

PS: remember to change the email back again in your s2Member settings before you go live.

PPS: Re paypal sandboxing in general – I don’t use it anymore. I set my buy buttons and forms etc to just charge 0.01 USD, then ask a friend to test for me. A friend will always spot anything odd in the flow, that you may overlook since you are very close to the site, and your friend is basically a new user/member. You’ll also get the emails from PayPal and your site etc exactly as you would when you go live. – Just make sure you change the price back before you do go live!

I had this problem also. VERY annoying and I really couldn’t find an answer anywhere on these forums. There was one person who posted something and then said .. “nevermind, it’s fixed now” but was not kind enough to explain the resolution.

So for anyone else who ends up where I was – here’s the solution that worked for me.

The problem was that I would get a ““The link you have used to enter the PayPal system is invalid. Please review the link and try again.” after clicking on the submit of the payment. EVERYTHING was configured properly, EXCEPT the email address. Paul’s answer led me to this but just to clarify. There will be 3 email addresses setup at a basic level when working with sandbox. There is the developer login for paypal, the sandbox login for a seller and the sandbox login for a buyer. You need to use the sandbox login for a seller in the configuration for s2member. NOT the developer login for paypal. In other words, use the fake email address with the random numbers. The one that is listed in the “Test Accounts” when you’re logged into developer.paypal.com.

It’s a bit confusing when you’ve never done this but basically when you log into developer.paypal.com you “enable” the sandbox usability. You setup a buyer and a seller test account. The seller test account info is what needs to be used in the Account Details tab in s2Member. The email address looks just like the API username except it doesn’t have the _api1.

I hope this is clear. Once I set this up, it worked beautifully!!!