Why is my PayPal checkout not working consistently?

[brian_njho]

Hey Shopify Fam!

I've been having an issue with PayPal checkout on & off. My other checkout methods have been working throughout.  This has been a re-occurring issue for the past 6 months.

The error message is "PayPal wasn’t available. Use a different payment method or try again later."

 

Appreciate it if anyone has a clue on what is causing the issue!

[Daniel]

Hi there, @brian_njho! 

Welcome to the Community! Definitely a great place to gather some input regarding anything about the platform!

With regards to your inquiry, have you made any notable changes to your store settings in the past 6 months? Also, taking a look at this PayPal community forums post, they also provide a solution regarding ensuring your browser is allowing for encryption.  

This can usually happen due to the configuration of the Paypal account and customers may see this if Encrypted Website Payments set to ON. Setting it to OFF will resolve the issue. This setting can be adjusted from within your PayPal account by navigating to

1. From your PayPal account, hover over the cog in the upper right corner of the
2. On the next screen, click Website Payments on the lower left
3. On the right side of the screen, click Update next to "Website preferences"

• Make sure the option under "Encrypted website payments" is set to OFF

Given the issue is happening with PayPal, we also recommend reaching out to their support team for assistance regarding this. More importantly. I look forward to hearing more from you. 

[brian_njho]

Hey Daniel,

Thanks for the informative reply! I have posted in the PayPal community forum yesterday, nothing from them yet.

As for notable store changes, we built this client site out during that period if I'm not mistaken. But we are unable to touch the checkout page due to not being on Shopify+.

For our PayPal settings, our encryption is turned OFF already. I attached some screenshots on all the settings our account has!

We have reached out to PayPal support as well, and are still waiting for them to get back to us...

But anyways.

I love the prompt reply. Thank you so much.

If you have any more advice on this after seeing the screenshots + that we built this store out without touching checkout.

I would love to hear how we could solve this!

[Daniel]

Thanks for the added information, Brian. 

Have you heard anything from PayPal regarding this? I am very curious to hear what they have to say regarding this recurring issue. Speaking of, in the past, will the problem just solve itself? If so, it might have to be an issue on their platform where perhaps, an outage/issue occurs causing the gateway to be unavailable for moments in time. 

While we wait, I recommend you also reach out to our live support team. I cannot guarantee they will have a solution for us besides redirecting you again to PayPal but it is definitely worth talking to them as they can open up back end settings on your account and see exactly what you are working with. 

We will do our best to stay with you and assist as much as we can regarding this but I also want to set expectations that since we are using a third party gateway, there is a chance that we also need their assistance regarding this as it is their own application. 

Looking forward to your update. 

[Jesse_Shanks]

I am having massive problems with PayPal right now too. We have used it with no issue for several years, but since last week my customers are getting error messages saying that payment didn't go through. In a couple of cases, PayPal charged their card but we never saw the money!! This obviously makes us look bad when we have to say "Sorry, but we don't have your money." I had to completely disable PayPal for now because I can't trust it, but 50% of our customers prefer to pay that way so we are now losing sales as a result! So fed up with PayPal right now. Here's the error we are getting...

 

[FatimaZahra18]

Hello @brian_njho ,

I have the same issue Can you please tell me what did you do in order to resorve it?

[jcheadle]

Solution does not work