Why is my PayPal checkout not working consistently?

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment

Topic summary

Intermittent PayPal checkout failures: Customers see “PayPal wasn’t available. Use a different payment method or try again later,” recurring for ~6 months; other payment methods work.

Troubleshooting and context:

  • Suggested fix: Turn OFF PayPal’s “Encrypted website payments” and ensure browser encryption is allowed. OP confirms this setting is already OFF and checkout wasn’t modified (not on Shopify+, which would allow checkout customization).
  • OP has posted in PayPal’s forum and contacted PayPal support; awaiting response. Screenshots show PayPal settings and error messages.

Additional reports and impact:

  • Other merchants report new/worsening failures since last week. Some customers were charged by PayPal, but funds never reached the store, forcing PayPal to be disabled and causing lost sales.
  • A user states the proposed encryption setting fix does not work for them.

Platform guidance:

  • Shopify staff note PayPal is a third-party gateway (external provider), recommend contacting PayPal support, and suggest also contacting Shopify live support to review account back-end settings. They speculate intermittent PayPal outages could be involved.

Status: No confirmed resolution. Key unknowns remain (root cause and prevention of charges without capture). Images are used to show the error screens and PayPal account settings.

Summarized with AI on January 26. AI used: gpt-5.
4

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.