Why did PayPal stop working for my USA customers in September 2022?

Start a Business
1

Hello,

I am located in Australia. For several years I have been selling my products online through Shopify. Most of my customers are in USA so I use a plugin to display my prices in USD. For the past several years I have not had any problems with this, customers would see USD price and would be able to pay with PayPal, everything got converted by Shopify and I see AUD on my end. Then in September 2022 problems began. I wonder if there was some sort of update that took place. But basically PayPal stopped working for my USA customers. I think it has something to do with that conversion process where Shopify used to just automatically let PayPal know the AUD equivalent and that is what my customers would get charged. Now that process seems to have been disrupted and my customers in USA have not been able to pay with PayPal for several months now. I have been working both with Shopify and PayPal to try and resolve this issue with no luck. I thought I’d ask on here perhaps anyone has had a similar thing happen, I can’t be the only one selling from Australia to USA customers. Maybe someone knows about what happened in September 2022 to cause this issues, perhaps some new setting or and update took place. Anything that can help me would be greatly appreciated. About 50% of my customers used to use PayPal, but now only those that are in Australia and paying in AUD can use it.

2

Just wanted to update with the solution in case anyone else is having this problem.

So what happened is Shopify introduced a new thing called Markets. You can see this section under settings.

The USA market was default set to USD, so what was happening with PayPal is because my shop is set to receive AUD and before this Markets was introduced Shopify was simply converting everything to AUD for me, now it was no longer converting and was glitching out PayPal.

The solution is to set the USA market to AUD. Because of my plug in I can still have the prices in my shop be displayed in USD, but now when customers go to check out it shows everything in AUD.

This on the one hand makes it so PayPal works, but on the other hand scares many customers because they do not understand currencies and just think that the price just jumped up for no reason and they are being charged more money.

So my plan is to test it out and see if it lowers my sales because of this new scare factor of price jumping up at checkout when it goes from USD to AUD, and if it hurts my sales I’ll just have to switch the USA market back to USD so it displays USD at all times and does not scare customers but then PayPal will not work, so I might just remove PayPal as a payment option all together then. Those are my initial thoughts on this.

1 Like