Paypal is a simple and complicated solution all at once for anyone accepting credit card payments on their website.

Forget implementing it, it was tough just getting started and purchasing the service.

It took nearly 3 weeks to get Payflow PRO working correctly but still the errors do NOT spit back correctly from the API. Sometimes, if somethings wrong in the code, it won’t even send the API string to paypal.

Finally, it works. We receive payments and everyone is happy. New business if OFF the ground!

Ever receive this lovely error: An error has occured: Field format error: Invalid or missing START/NEXTPAYMENTDATE Field [7]?

For more than a week, we’ve been taking calls from companies telling us “we keep getting this strange error!!” and lost thousands in sales.

Paypal merchant customer service is unreal. We find techs (needle in a haystack) that are very helpful and work through the technical aspects of the site such as looking at code and really trying to fix the problems we have. Then, we find those techs who read from the handbook and say “Sorry sir, we cannot support your code. You will need to hire a programmer to look at it”.

Thats great! They won’t support our code that is receiving an API error from their system or BECAUSE of their system.

Anyway, we finally got someone on the phone who followed-up via email and solved the problem.

For anyone have ANY similar issues, try the following:

A) Try running their information through the system yourself to reproduce the error they receive. It could be their machine, not your system.

B) Take the credit card and run a manual authorization transaction through your paypal manager

C) If B) works, try to create a profile using the EXACT profile information the API string sends to the paypal manager from your website

If C) fails, you’re in luck. If it works, you’ve got more problems! If it fails, you most likely have the same problem we had:

You must limit the # of characters for each field being sent in the API string. Paypal has all sorts of string/character limitations for their profiles. For example, the “profile name” can’t be more than 46 or 47 characters. The reason the signups failed and we potentially lost $1000’s is because the profile name being sent in the API string to create the profile was over 47 characters!

Information provided by QI: Search Engine Placement Company

Tags: paypal error codes, paypal errors, paypal problems

This entry was posted on Friday, August 8th, 2008 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Business, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.