Shipping being charged for digital products

We set up s2Member to sell access to a video series and we used the Paypal Specific Post/Page Buttons generator to create our Paypal button. This is the shortcode we used on our sales page:

[s2Member-PayPal-Button sp="1" ids="1047" exp="43800" desc="Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers: A Virtual Workshop | $197" ps="paypal" lc="" cc="USD" dg="0" ns="1" custom="www.willieverbegoodenough.com" ra="197.00" image="http://www.willieverbegoodenough.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/circle_orange-buy-now-paypal.jpg" output="button" /]

We sold 14 of these with no issues but now when you click the paypal buy button the transaction page at Paypal is adding an $8 shipping and handling charge. We do sell physical goods elsewhere on the site and this is the shipping charge for 1 item, however, we added the virtual access well after the other items and it was originally working fine.

I’ve talked to Paypal and they said that we should talk to you. Any suggestions?

Hi Karyl.

The shortcode looks fine. s2Member doesn’t add a shipping cost, so I guess PayPal is adding it for you based on your settings with them.

We do sell physical goods elsewhere on the site and this is the shipping charge for 1 item

Where did you configure this amount for the shipping? Is there a setting to apply it to a specific product so it doesn’t get added to the s2Member ones too?

Thanks for your response. I went back to Paypal and they said that the setting is coming from you since the button was generated by your system, not theirs. When they found out this was a system operating in WordPress they backed off even further indicating that WP settings overrode theirs…

In addition to the digital access we sell through our s2Member installation, we also sell 2 physical products. We created the Paypal buttons through Paypal and we set up shipping for these products from the Shipping Methods and Rates section of Paypal. We charge shipping based on number of items purchased. If you purchase 1-2 items you’re charged $8.00. With larger quantities the shipping rate decreases.

When we set up digital access with s2Member a week ago last Friday, our test transactions and our first 14 ‘real’ transactions went through with no shipping fees assessed. We made one change, which was to extend the access period from 1 year to 5 years and sometime after that the shipping charge started to show up. Could this extension have triggered something?

I really need your help in tracking this down. If I need to go back to paypal, what do I need to tell them to help troubleshoot this?

Thanks.

One other thing, after the shipping started to show up, I reset the access to 1 year but it didn’t resolve the shipping charge issue.

Thanks.

Karyl,

This is definitely a PayPal issue, as s2Member doesn’t add (or even have any way of adding) a shipping cost. I suggest looking on your PayPal account for any global options that may automatically add a shipping charge to transactions. It sounds like after someone checks out using s2Member, they’re sent to PayPal where an $8 shipping charge is added to the total.

Usually the shipping charge is added on a per-button basis, but if you’re using shopping-cart type features on PayPal, there may be a global shipping charge option that is affecting your s2Member checkouts.

If you cannot find any global shipping charge option on your PayPal account, I suggest contacting PayPal and asking them about it. Neither WordPress nor s2Member has anything to do with PayPal shipping charges, so I suspect the support rep you spoke to was inexperienced.