Paypal - Dont Ship to your Address - anyone else with this problem?

[Mort-lemur]

Hi, I seem to have a problem which is costing me some orders and I cannot seem to solve it - has anyone else seen this?

 

The scemario is that the customer logs in with paypal, or uses paypal express to check out without having created an account on the site.

 

Normally all is good, BUT if the customer has an incomplete address as their paypal address, or if their county does not match 100% what is in my shipping tables (MGZMTS) eg. Yorks instead of Yorkshire then they get the message "sorry we do not ship to your area" and nothing they do as far as amending their shipping address on the site will alow them to check out.

 

If I set allow shiping to undefined zones then they can checkout without being charged shipping

 

This is driving me nuts !

[Mort-lemur]

Grrrr just had another one - the customer had created an account on the site, but when they used paypal express to try to check out, because their paypal address did not have a county, they got the dreaded "we do not ship to your address" message.

 

It looks like the express address takes priority over the address they have entered when creating an account......

[MrPhil]

I don't have a fix for the immediate problem, but perhaps it would be helpful to these customers to add something to a page just before being sent off to PayPal (or immediately upon return) telling them how to deal with this error message (i.e., they need to bring their PayPal address up to spec).

[Mort-lemur]

Thanks Phil, but that would make shopping on the store complicated, with the customer needing to amend their paypal details before they could shop, so I think a % would still abandon the cart.

 

I have toyed with the idea of adding all the variations I can think of to my shipping tables - but gave up on that as there could be so many, eg. N Yorks, N Yorkshire, North Yorks, North Yorkshire - thats without taking into account spelling mistakes! and the customers who dont even bother having a county in their paypal address.

 

Is this an osc wide problem or is it specific to my particular set up?

[BrockleyJohn]

@@Mort-lemur, I'm about to port a bunch of bespoke shipping methods to 2.3.4+BS 

 

They include banded shipping rated by postcode. Any use to you, Heather? That ought to be filled in.

[MrPhil]

People will always be innovative in how they write their address, and a computer system can't be expected to handle every single possibility. For example, the state of Pennsylvania, in addition to numerous misspellings, can be abbreviated Penn, Pa, Penns, Penna -- and those are just the most widely accepted (the Postal Service wants PA). If your store (osC) doesn't recognize an address (e.g., a standard county name), I would have no problem with nudging the customer to supply a more standard address (possibly with a drop-down for state or county names). If PayPal bounces it back because it can't figure out the proper address, and you can see it failed, what's the harm in suggesting that the customer fix their PayPal address? The alternative is to have the whole thing fail.

[Mort-lemur]

@@MrPhil Thats the problem - the whole thing fails and the customer leaves, or sends me an email telling me that we should deliver to their address......

 

What confuses things for them is the fact that by the time they have selected paypal checkout and been told we dont ship to them, that their address has been captured by the site, so they amend this and try to checkout again, without success, as the paypal address takes priority over the site address which frustrates them even more......

 

Im trying to avoid extra pages or pop-ups, what may be required is a method to allow the site shipping address to take priority over the paypal address, and to only allow the customer to proceed if the address is correct (as it currently does for other payment methods such as Phone with card, EPDQ, cheque, Bank Transfer) where only the site stored address is used and they can select their county from  a dropdown.

 

@@BrockleyJohn sounds interesting, keep me posted please

 

This is an email I received from such a customer who did not have a county set on paypal, and I emailed her to suggest she added one:

 

"Many thanks for letting me know.

I generally cause confusion with my efforts at doing things with the computer. Think I will stick to face to face. Thanks for your help"

 

So I dont think merly asking them to correct their paypal details would help too much....

[MrPhil]

So I dont think merly asking them to correct their paypal details would help too much....

 

So are they going to encounter this problem any time they try to buy with PayPal, or would it be limited to your store?

[Mort-lemur]

Thanks Phil, but once it starts to get difficult I find that a lot of my customers leave and go to a bricks and mortar store - as the majority of our customers are older farmers.

 

I dont want to say to them "you cant shop with us until you get your paypal address right"

[oscMarket]

i think you should focus on fixing your MGZMTS, instead anything else.
 
As there is the problem created in the first place, no?
 
So... via a trick i think you can manipulate that.
 
First there should be looked up what is comming back from paypal.
 
Now you could build an array like you already found out :
 
$pp_zone_return = array('N Yorks', 'N Yorkshire', 'North Yorks', 'North Yorkshire', 'Yorks', 'North');//whatever suits.
 
Now you need to find out what is related to your setup zones.
 
Let's assume you setted up the related zone-id on second place
 
(i go name that setting $zoneID , as i do not know this add-on out of my head).
(i go name the real returning value from paypal $real_return , as i do not know out of my head how it is coded)

$pp_zone_return = array('N Yorks', 'N Yorkshire', 'North Yorks', 'North Yorkshire', 'Yorks', 'North');//whatever suits.

if (in_array($real_return, $pp_zone_return)) {    

$zoneID = $zoneID['1'];
}

It is not the most charming solution, but that should work and is easy to maintain in your case and skills.

Is it not strange that paypal does not cover such zones correctly....by allowing incomplete name for these zones, somehow i have a hunch that such is covered in paypal settings?

[Mort-lemur]

Thanks Henry,

 

But again that would create a monster, with so many counties, so many variations and so many possible spelling mistakes, not to mention the customers who do not even have a county in their paypal address.

 

There must be another solution for this - and am I the only one with the problem? Can someone confirm that it works like this on their site?

[burt]

This reminds me of address_override where you can override existing paypal details.

 

You'll need to hunt Google for more info

and

see what the module you are using is doing about it (if anything)

 

Summary

Paypal allows people to insert (in)correct details.

osCommerce allows people to insert (in)correct details.

 

If one does not match the other, Paypal should not bomb out - and that is what address_override is for (if I recall correctly)

[Mort-lemur]

@@burt Thank for that Gary,

 

I have had a scan of this page: https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/express-checkout/integration-guide/ECCustomizing/

 

and nothing seems to fit exactly.

 

You can Do an address override - but then the site stored address needs to be provided - which is against the benifits of login with pp and pp express

 

You can suppress the paypal stored address and default to the site stored address - see above

 

None of the options seem to offer a middle position where a comparison can be made.....

 

Could do with an input from @@harald on this one as I only know about the lost sales from a database change @@harald gave me (which predates the pp app) that allows me to see the paypal post and return messages - and from the occasional email and phone call

 

But from what I can see I am losing a couple of sales a day due to this and Im sure others will be too but are just not aware of it......

[oscMarket]

Then there is simply no other solution as to what @@MrPhil suggests.

 

 

If PayPal bounces it back because it can't figure out the proper address, and you can see it failed, what's the harm in suggesting that the customer fix their PayPal address? The alternative is to have the whole thing fail.

 

Even farmers/old people/non-PC-experienced people must provide correct details.

 

I did a search as well and came on sites where there was mainly discussed about Buyers providing wrong addresses to Ebay sellers.

Conclusion THERE was that they only SHIP to the "registered" address.

In these cases the address what is on their CC.

So.. if not have a CC..........what then?

 

 

 

 

Maybe it is best to get rid of the pp express and let the user simply register.

 

One last suggestion is that you might go use a less precise shipping rate. (if that is possible)

 

Of course the solution mentioned by @@BrockleyJohn would suit aswell, as it will be more accurate.

[Mort-lemur]

Problem is that I like pp express - as it seems do a lot of my customers.

 

I cant provide a more relaxed shipping set up as I offer 4 levels of shipping which for two of them is very much dependant on the shipping area for the price - one area in mainland UK can cost £8.60 to ship an order to, whilst the same order going to a scottish island would cost £17.20 - so its costly to get it wrong....

 

This must be costing a lot of OSC / pp express users a lot of orders if they use any zone based shipping methods......

[MrPhil]

PayPal is trying to protect your customers by making sure that merchandise can't be shipped to someone else, but the address has to match a billing address or some authorized physical address. If your customers are sophisticated enough to be using credit cards or other payments online, I don't think it's unreasonable to explain to them that their addresses are going to have to match up, if they don't want PayPal to block orders on suspicion of fraud. They should only have to do it once, shouldn't they? If you can catch the error return from PP refusing the payment, if you can't override it yourself you can at least give a message telling your customers how to fix the situation.

 

It's the 21st century. Fraud and other online crime is rampant, and your customers should appreciate someone trying to protect them.

[BrockleyJohn]

@@MrPhil that's not really the issue here. County has not been an official part of a UK postal address since 1996. Paypal is perfectly correct in allowing people not to put a county or to put in whatever they like. In fact, it's basically a vanity field these days. Trying to do any processing based on what's in it is fundamentally flawed. Even when it had official values, no one could keep up with what they were and there were any number of abbreviations.

 

I have left checkouts that provided a drop-down list in which I couldn't find an entry I thought appropriate, and I get mail from lots of companies with 'Dont need this line' in an address line that was mandatory but didn't have an appropriate value for my address.

 

That said, I did build an addon to validate (or was it automate?) a sensible choice of county in relation to the post town for osc addresses - probably getting on for 10 years and several hard disks ago now.

[trier]

@@Mort-lemur

 

I know virtually nothing about PayPal Express and even less about MGZMTS (whatever that is), so probably none of this will help, but just in case (apologies if it’s long winded and useless or asking/stating the obvious) -

 

Postal counties are very much falling into dis-use. It doesn’t help that often one of three different counties can be used for the same address (even when spelt correctly) e.g.

 

Traditional:       Yorkshire                       Sussex

Administrative:    East Riding of Yorkshire        Brighton & Hove

Formal Postal:     North Humberside                East Sussex

 

If using PayPal Express you really have to ignore any site account addresses you may have because a totally different delivery address may have been input and returned from PP.

 

Presumably most of your postal charges are the same with a relatively small number of exceptions?

 

Do you have, or is it possible to have, a list of the optional charges with a default if not not found?

 

Is it possible to use postcode (much more reliable?) instead of county?

 

I believe there are currently 124 postal areas (i.e. the first 1 or 2 alpha chars of the postcode). Are you able to use these within MGZMTS instead of county?

 

If the postal area is not accurate enough, I believe there are currently 2986 different ‘part 1’ of the postcode (i.e. the first 3 or 4 characters – hopefully you do format the postcode onto ‘part1’ & ‘part 2’?), does that help at all?

 

Probably a lot more work, but is it possible to use a postcode lookup to find county for use in MGZMTS. Addon 6322 is a UK postcode lookup which uses craftyclicks.co.uk, their lookup charges are very reasonable (better still for customers if used in account create).

 

bph-postcodes.co.uk has a lot of addressing/postcode information including a list of the 124 postal areas.

 

You are obviously using a courier as Royal Mail has the same charges countrywide – have you tried contacting the courier to see if they can help or have something you can access?

 

I am guessing you will either have to rely on postcode or not use PP Express?

 

[Mort-lemur]

Thanks for al the suggestions....

 

@@MrPhil its not a case of the address being incorrect - its a case of the abbreviation used not matching my site - so their address on paypal is correct as "Yorks" but my site wont allow shipping as it looks for "Yorkshire" so I would be asking customers to amend their address to match what we say to allow them to shop with us - which would be a little arrogant on our part.

 

@@trier my postal charges are based on weight tables and zones - the zones are set by county / state in the MGZMT shipping method - and I really need this to stand as the courier rates vary by a great deal if we ship to remote / offshore or european addresses.

 

In my simple mind the checkout flow should be:

 

1. The customer chooses paypal express - if the address matches the shipping zones all is good and the order goes through
2. if the paypal address does not match a shipping zone, then instead of being told sorry we dont ship to that address they are redirected to the site edit address page where they can enter a matching address (as we already have dropdown counties)
3. They then proceed to pp express again, with the site address taking priority over the paypal address for the purposes of shipping calculations.

I cannot believe this has not come up before, maybe its a case of shop owners not being aware that it is happening.

[MrPhil]

Well, it would certainly look to me like "Yorks" does not match "Yorkshire", at least enough to satisfy PayPal. Therefore, non-matching addresses are being given, and PayPal's security mechanism is tripped.

 

Perhaps public complaints should be made to PayPal that they should be a bit looser in matching county names or whatever the problem is. The alternative is to remind customers that they need to have a match if they're going to give a county name in various places, and can't go willy-nilly giving all sorts of different formats.

[Mort-lemur]

@@MrPhil I think you have picked up on the wrong problem - paypal is completly happy with yorks, paypals security system is not being tripped - what is happening is paypal says ship to Yorks - OSC says we dont have a shipping rate for Yorks - Therefore the error that we dont ship to that address.

[Dan Cole]

Heather...just a thought and probably a dumb one, but in case it helps...can you change or add a county drop down list to your site that matches the one used by Paypal?  ie duplicate their drop down list assuming they use one of course?

 

Dan

[Mort-lemur]

@@Dan Cole Thanks Dan, That is a good suggestion, however, even if paypal use a dropdown list (my site does) then it must not be mandatory, as some customers have wildly different counties, or no counties at all on their paypal address.

[MrPhil]

OK, thanks for the clarification. I'm not familiar with PPE, but it sounds like PayPal is providing the shipping address to be used. Correct? The first question to ask, is why osC needs to validate this address? Would it be reasonable to disable the address check/validation on the osC side, and just assume that PayPal is providing a legitimate address? Even if some validation is still a good idea, could osC be modified to ignore the county entry (since it seems to be optional)? The last resort would be to make broader acceptance of the county name, perhaps using pattern matching (e.g., York* or any truncation of Yorkshire).

[Mort-lemur]

@@MrPhil Hi Phil,

 

the PPE instant update facility on the OSC PPE module bounces the paypal address back to OSC to get the shipping amount from the stores shipping module, its not actually validating the address its checking to see what the shipping amount is for the order.

 

If (as in my case) you have the shipping tables set up in MTMGZ shipping so that the counties are used as the shipping zones then any missmatch will result in the error message.

 

I have just checked on the paypal new customer creation screen, and actually adding a county is optional as is adding an address second line, so if a customer wanted they could simply set their address as follows:

 

John Smith

28

Leeds

L1 2AB

 

and paypal would be quite happy with that address although there is no street name or county specified. So my site would look for a county to provide a shipping cost, then the error message.

 

Now what would happen is that the address above would have been passed by paypal and added to the OSC database as the customers address - so they sometimes then go to their account page, modify  correct the address and try checking out with paypal again, but cannot as the paypal address still does not contain a county, and the paypal ddress seems to take priority over the address now stored on the site.