Your Order is free. No payment is required

Payments + Shipping & Fulfilment
1

Hi,

We sell online courses and offer some for free. Usually, if the cart ends up with 0€, a message appears: ‘Your Order is free. No payment is required’. People can get free products without giving payment information.

Today, someone said, that he is always required to pay at least 0.01€ for free products and shared a screenshot of his PayPal link. Has someone an idea what could be the reason for this special case and what we can do against it?

Best, Marco

2

Hi, @MarcoAT .

Thank you for reaching out and posting this question!

I understand that a customer is reporting a 0.01€ charge on free products when using PayPal. Just to confirm, are you seeing the charge when looking at their order in the Shopify admin?

I believe this is a common method for financial partners, like PayPal, to verify linked credit cards or bank accounts. However, these charges should disappear or get refunded automatically over the next couple of days as well. That being said, if the customer has more concerns about the charge or they’re not seeing the charge disappear or refunded after a few days, then we’d recommend having the customer to contact PayPal or their credit card provider for further clarifications.

I noticed that you are a new member of our Shopify Community! Once you’ve resolved the issue with the customer, I’d love to hear more about your experience so far and potentially share some resources to help with your business!

3

Hi Elias,

My concern is, why some people are required to enter payment information at all when no money needs to be transferred. It is not about the 1 cent but rather the effort and potential trust issues.

Could it be some cookies that are not installed from the customer, the customer’s browser choice or anything else that I can do to avoid this to happen?

4

Hi, @MarcoAT .

Thank you for following up!

I’m aware that there could be a 0.01 cent charge whenever someone sets up their PayPal account for the first time. However, I’m not sure if this charge is a result from your store. Based on the information you’ve shared, this only seems to be happening with customers using PayPal - is this correct? Also, do you have any orders in your admin showing this 0.01 cent charge?

If you have some specific examples for us to look into, then we’d be happy to access your account and take a closer look. While we’re not able to provide account-specific support via the Shopify Community at this time, we’d be happy to continue assisting you through live chat, email, or callback. Please visit the Shopify Help Center and log in to your account to create a support request.

That being said, the customers can also reach out to PayPal and they can clarify the purpose of the 0.01 cent charge that is specific to their account as well.

If you’ve any other questions, don’t hesitate to let me know!