Why you should never use PayPal for ecommerce

by | Jun 9, 2024

PayPal is the eternal thorn in my side. While once the popular & industry accepted solution to take payments on the web, or send money between friends has now been turned into a shell of what it formerly was. And, I can’t say I blame PayPal. It seems as if they’ve positioned themselves to be more on the consumer side of things, rather than business/ecommerce side of things.

This blog post was inspired by a route of frustrations we’ve recently had with PayPal on a client site.

To start, their official WordPress plugin for WooCommerce has a solid 2.0 rating, making it one of the worst plugins to be developed. It appears to be developed by a mixture of WooCommerce team & a 3rd party on behalf of PayPal. I have no doubt that the plugin is technically sound, but the API’s, system & documentation by PayPal is the hiccup. We have a few customers on this plugin, and we’ve had to modify it to work and optimize it for an optimal user experience.

Other plugins integrate with PayPal too, like Gravity Forms Standard Add-on for PayPal. Even for WordPress experts like us, we were facing issues that we couldn’t resolve (we eventually did).

One of the errors we were getting with the form was this. Online suggests it is anything from cache issue to a plugin conflict. Neither were the case, and it was determined it was a reCAPTCHA issue with Gravity Forms.

We still are not 100% sure if it was the sole issue but it seemed to resolve it once we turned it off. We felt comfortable turning it off due to spammers not being able to get through because of the payment requirement.

We also found a potential secondary issue with it. PayPal is not passing the updated status back to Gravity Forms from pending to completed. We saw the “payment_status”, “transaction_id” and “payment_method” is being stored which is inside the complete_payment() method. so we converted “Pending” text to “Completed” if it contains the “transaction_id” with the the payment_method = ”  because it is always “” for all the past “Paid” transactions.

We highly recommend staying away from PayPal, but if they must be used, we hope this guide can help you navigate and troubleshoot your issues!

Written By Blake Whittle

Owner of ClikIT, Blake has been involved in WordPress since 2014. Once designer & developer, now he manages the team at ClikIT and provides project management & strategic vision to their clients. Now, he's leading the change at ClikIT to become a plugin company.

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