Intermittent Paypal ordering problems

Hi,

Our client is having intermittent problems when some customers order through Paypal. For some customers, the checkout doesn't go through to Paypal to complete payment, while for others it does. The redirection page to Paypal sometimes hangs and nothing happens when some customers press the button to go through to Paypal. Sometimes, orders are created several times within two minutes of each other, but the customer cannot complete the order.

Is anyone experiencing the same? If you have any ideas or suggestions, we'd really appreciate it.

This is the website: www.janehamerton.com

Thanks.

Having orders being created several times within two minutes is quite common.

It means that the user cancelled on paypal, got back to the checkout and went to paypal again.

It happens on our website too.

For the rest I don't know.
As far as I know it's working fine.
Do they get error messages ?

Hi Nicolas

Thanks for replying. One of the problems was in IE Chrome. The customers said, ' I was on the checkout page where you choose how to pay and I had chosen the first option which was card and paypal. I ticked the paypal box but it wouldn't connect me to the page and an error message came up. I tried a few times but it kept crashing.' The customer couldn't remember the error message.

In our test, it went through to Paypal. A real dilemma as some customers are experiencing problems, whereas others aren't.

Any ideas?

I'm afraid that without the error message, we won't be able to tell you much since you can't reproduce the problem

Did you try with all the different browsers on your end ?

One error that PayPal users sometimes have is this one:

Bad Request

Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand.
Size of a request header field exceeds server limit.

Cookie: cookie_check=yes; KHcl0EuY7AKSMgfvHl7J5E7hPtK=Qdarnrdu27YR5H0I6UyRe1st1_uAMIxPy858PdHDFPz4NH2XzoEeZDqh8Tv7ebSzhrNCNH0Dx

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that PayPal wants to fix it:
www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Feedback-...en-years/td-p/462983

Hi Nicolas,

Thanks for the info.

Maybe we should just go for SagePay and forget about PayPal.

Do you know of any issues with SagePay?

I've never heard of issues with it besides the normal setup issues.

Hi Nicolas,

Another error was reported today. The customer couldn't go through to Paypal as it got stuck in HikaShop. This was the message from the customer:

'I'm using a Mac and didn't actually get to the actual payment page. I clicked the pay by credit card bit and then added the address details and when I clicked 'next' a message advised to click on the button below if it didn't reload in 10 seconds which it didn't and as there wasn't a button so I pressed return several times.'

The client does have this quite frequently and we haven't a clue why it happens only sometimes. If you can shed any light on it, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks.

It's possible that the button does not appear in some cases.
Make sure that you don't have any CSS related to paypal in the hikashop frontend CSS file.
There were some before and we removed it since then to avoid issues with the image of the button not being loaded in some cases.

Thanks for replying.

It seems the customer went from filling in the address page to the payment option page. At that point, the page turned to a dark grey window - and the next button to go through to PayPal just froze. In our tests this didn't happen.

Really strange. Does this sound familiar to you Nicolas?

The page turning grey doesn't ring a bell.
That happens with popups, but I don't see why it would do that here.

Hi Nicolas,

I've managed to drag some more information out of the client:

She was using Safari(Mac OSX). I just tested in Safari on a Mac as well here's what happens:

1. when I click 'next' on the first checkout step, the step 2 opens in a new tab
2. when I click 'next' on step 2 in the second tab, a third tab opens. In this third tab, it shows me the page of step 2, but the link in the address bar shows step 3

My checkout workflow is: 1. Login, Address -> 2. Coupon, Cart, -> 3. Payment, Shipping, Status, Cart, Terms and Conditions.

This problem only seems to happen in Safari; it's fine in IE, Chrome & Firefox.

Does this information help at all?

That sounds to be a problem in Safari:
discussions.apple.com/thread/3854196?start=0&tstart=0

That's the case closed then, I think.

Thank you very much, Nicolas.