Fail Fail Fail, Orders Are Failing Today!

Hi @nelsonleemiller,

Failing subscription orders and voiding the authorization is the intended behavior when PayPal could not save the payment method in the Vault: https://woocommerce.com/document/woocommerce-paypal-payments/#subscription-flow

This is not a problem with the plugin but with PayPal not saving the payment method. Without a saved payment method, subscription renewal payments are not possible.
To prevent this failure from only occurring with a time delay when the first renewal payment is attempted, the subscription signup order is failed right away instead. The handling could be more transparent, so the next plugin update provides a feature that allows you to capture the (signup) payments regardless while providing more details about the failure.
But without a saved payment method, automatic renewal payments would still not be possible.

Kind regards,
Niklas

Thanks for your response. Yes please update the plugin!

Can you clarify if this is a new issue/change with PayPal that recently happened regarding the saving of payment tokens?

Just today we had more failed orders, and the customer paid for them on the order confirmation page. We don’t recall this issue happening until very recently.

Can you clarify if this is a new issue/change with PayPal that recently happened regarding the saving of payment tokens?

No, this is not new and nothing has changed recently. The behavior to fail subscription orders when the payment method could not be saved in the Vault has been in place ever since the 1.6.2 update.
Before that, the subscription signup was successful, but then it would fail when the renewal payment is attempted (when no payment method is saved in the Vault). So the problem only occurred with a time delay.
Whether or not the payment method can be saved in the Vault depends on PayPal.
If this is a frequently occuring issue for you, I suggest reaching out to the PayPal MTS with a copy of your PayPal Payments log files.

The next update is still being worked on, but you can give an early version of the feature a try with this plugin version.
It is still a work in progess, but you can find more details about the new setting in this issue: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce-paypal-payments/issues/728
We do not yet recommend using it on production though as there are still tests that haven’t been completed. But you can give it a try on a staging site to see how it works for you when buying a subscription product with a payment method that couldn’t be saved in the Vault (e.g. a non-Vault ready sandbox credit card).

Kind regards,
Niklas

We have never had this issue before. Now every customer is facing it, meaning we will just need to use Stripe and abandon PayPal. Another customer just left our store because it took 3 minutes to process the payment.

Can you give me an update on this? We have not had a successful PayPal transaction in the last 10 days, and obviously this is critical to a business.

Our transaction list is a big long list of Voided, Voided, Voided. In WooCommerce it’s a big list of Failed, Failed, Failed. Please work with the PayPal tech support and get this resolved ASAP! I have sent their technical support a link to this conversation and asked them to work with you to solve the issue.

Hi @nelsonleemiller,

The failure could only be delayed from the signup to the renewal.
With this plugin version, the plugin would capture the initial payment for the subscription signup.
But the failure would occur when the automatic renewal payment is attempted, if PayPal failed to save the payment method in the Vault after the initial transaction. In that case, the buyer must manually confirm the renewal payment from the website.
The next plugin update will provide multiple options to choose from, but this version above should not actively fail the subscription signup order anymore if saving the payment method failed.

Kind regards,
Niklas

As mentioned before, these orders are NOT renewals, they are first time customers who are all very confused and angry. Please clearly address this issue in your response, as the last response was irrelevant. What exact steps should I take to resolve this, if any?

I am posting a reply here from PayPal Merchant Technical Support:

Hi Nelson,

Thank you for contacting PayPal Global Technical Support. I'm sorry to hear of the troubles. 

<strong>In this instance, you will need to work with the plugin developer/owner directly. PayPal does not directly support 3rd-party plugins. I did review our XML logs and show that the void request is coming directly from the plugin: </strong>

https://snipboard.io/IutlBP.jpg
Apologies for any inconvenience this has caused. 

Thank you!

Sincerely,

Carlos
Global Technical Support
PayPal

Hello,

It has been quite some time since our last communication, so we will mark this thread as resolved. Please open a new thread if you are still facing issues or have questions that you need us to answer.

Kind regards,
Andreas

@aweissinpsyde Is that an automatic response? I can’t decide if I should laugh or cry at this. You are right – it has been quite some time since YOUR last communication.

Having the exact same issue. Any updates on this?

I have opened a new issue here: https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/follow-up-orders-are-failing