HN Explorer

PayPal “Buy Now” buttons have been broken for a week

134 points by davisr ↗ HN
Eight days ago, PayPal broke their Buy Now buttons ^[1] for customers who sell electronic goods (i.e. who don't collect shipping addresses).

The error is because they use `eval()` in their JavaScript, which browsers block. So far, they have been unable to fix the issue.

If you are a PayPal merchant using a payment button who sells digital goods, this might be why your payments stopped over a week ago. PayPal support is mostly unhelpful.

A workaround purported in the community forum is to start collecting a shipping address, and set the shipping rate to 0.00.

[1]: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/PayPal-Payments-Standard/Complete-Purchase-Button-failing/td-p/3073625

48 comments

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jzombie
I find that customer support from a lot of companies these days is remarkably degraded from a few years ago.

Some companies, I can't even "spend" money with because of this.

A real crisis.

para_parolu
Hi, I’m a virtual assistant. How can I help you today? Please, select of of 3 available answers.
ezekg
Great! Our Support Center has a few helpful articles on that:
goda90
I was trying to change my policy with Geico today. The web browser "virtual assistant" told me I had to go to another page and gave me the link, but then the assistant and its button disappeared when I navigated away. I switched to the mobile app to try again. The available answers eventually got me to an agent who helped me, but part way through I left WiFi range and was disconnected. Trying to get on again I manually asked to skip to the agent and the virtual assistant got confused. So I clicked on one of the available answers and it got confused by its own answers. By chance I got back to the same agent, but it was definitely clunky.
donalhunt
Reality: they only have 1 agent.

There has been a major shift to using chat bots and knowledge bases to reduce the demand on human agents. This allows companies to reduce staffing costs considerably. Less staff, less management.

Unfortunately, there seems to be minimal investment in analysing the user experience over time. Few companies update their bot when there are known issues impacting their service (like they would for phone IVRs).

a_bonobo
I heard a talk about 2 weeks ago from a law person who mentioned that of all the money ChatGPT is making for companies, the number one driver is savings due from customer support. ChatGPT is not pushing is towards AGI, it's only pushing Doctorow's enshittification.
jzombie
As an AI language model, I don't have real-time information on specific events or talks that have taken place after my knowledge cutoff in September 2021. However, I can provide some general insights based on the information available up until that time.
ggwp99
I do think the prevalance and low cost of bots caused this.
imhoguy
They are now pouring money into AI hype to build the ultimate support service which I bet will be shitty as hell too because of obvious "cost cutting" and detachement from reality.
jzombie
That sounds about right. I was trying to activate a Windows copy on a rented machine and ran through so many hoops that when I finally spoke to someone I just said that I lost my patience and that I couldn't even remember why I was trying to activate it in the first place.
prirun
The reality is, unfortunately, it's more profitable to not have customer support at all if things work for most customers, and let the customers with problems just leave.
nucleative
I hate that you're right. And almost all of us will eventually be that customer with a problem someday.
s900mhz
Agreed, with one exception. Costco rolled out live chat and I had to use it twice. The wait time sucks but when connected I was able to get two representatives who knew what they were doing.

Also they let you skip all the auto messages and go straight to a human which is great in the world of dialog tree hell

caseyf
I ran into this problem and it seemed to be triggered when 1) shipping addresses are not needed/collected and 2) the receiver account has any kind of sales tax calculations set up (deep in the PayPal settings)

I reported the issue via Merchant Technical Support on the 22nd and got this response yesterday:

"Unfortunately, the problem you're experiencing appears to be caused by technical issues within the PayPal system.

I added this account to our existing engineering ticket so that when the problem is resolved, you will be notified of its completion right away.

Our engineers are already working diligently on a solution to this problem. This ticket will remain in a "Pending Fix" status until you're contacted about the resolution.

I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience!"

davisr
This is the first I'm hearing about sales tax being involved--and (1) + (2) perfectly describe my business. I've disabled sales tax...let's see if that helps.

FWIW, I received a similar statement from their MTS today. Only that "they're working on it" and "I'll be notified". Although, your ticket is in "Pending Fix" and mine is "On Hold" (so it doesn't get auto-closed, they said).

Thanks for the tip! PayPal should be paying _you_.

davisr
(Reporting back) PayPal has now fixed this issue.
ricardonunez
One of my side projects was not making sales for a few days, I thought it was some Google Algo update. Tomorrow I’ll check on this and see if I have anything to report.
mnordhoff
Is collecting a shipping address because PayPal's JavaScript is broken legal under the GDPR?
donalhunt
Yes. Collecting data because it's required to process an order / provide a service would be legal.

You are then responsible for protecting that data too which is why you would prefer not to collect it if possible.

pschuegr
Paypal's customer support is a disaster, and I refuse to use the service anymore after they shut my account down because a withdrawal failed - without informing me - and sent it to collections, also without informing me. The hoops I had to jump through to get it reinstated were a massive pain in the ass, and if it were to happen again, I would happily ignore it forever just because they deserve nothing more.

The sooner that company burns to the ground, the better.

jmrm
> I refuse to use the service anymore after they shut my account down because a withdrawal failed

I don't know how people still usrs PayPal after so many people had those issues

rationalist
Because PayPal is so pervasive, that even with all of those problems, it's still maybe only less than 0.5% of people that have issues with PayPal?
12907835202
I had more issues with stripe than PayPal... PayPal user for 15 years (maybe that time gives me some grace with their systems?) And no issues minus the botched move from S- subscriptions to I- subscriptions.

Stripe let me take 3 weeks of preorders then told me they were going to hold on to my money for 4 months (may be more or less I can't remember) because the payments were suspicious.

I then had invoices from suppliers to pay but not the money from customers to pay it.

Never touched stripe since.

I've tried to move to Arden but they require 1 million gross which I'm not doing.

Braintree (also PayPal) won't respond to sign up requests or emails.

So yeah I'm sticking with PayPal after 15 years. Oldest still active subscription is 9 years I think.

But if they did suddenly close my account my company wouldn't recover, scary thought.

jlund-molfese
Even if the input is completely safe, why would a web application need to use eval() in js?
justinclift
Because that's what StackOverflow had in the answer they were looking at... ;)
exogen
In a similar vein, I swear only about 30% of Apple Pay buttons I encounter on the web actually work. The rest produce a little popup with spinner briefly and then disappear. It's incredibly frustrating.
throwaway290
Interesting. Back when I had Apple Pay enabled bank card I never saw a site where it didn't work. Either there is no Pay or it works. I think the only cases were when the card associated with Pay is not accepted for other reasons (ineligible billing address/country etc).
sethherr
I second this! Every Apple Pay integration I’ve used has been a flawless, so much so that it makes it slightly more likely I’ll buy a product because it’s so fast and easy.
FriedPickles
Where do you see Apple pay on the web? I was excited when it came out, but have only seen it once or twice since then.
throwaway290
Where do you live and do you have apple pay check enabled in Safari settings?

I see it all over. I was shopping for a keyboard literally yesterday and saw Apple Pay on mechanicalkeyboards and splitkb. I also bought Icebreaker gloves not long ago and they also had Apple Pay. This is from a German IP.

pertymcpert
Anywhere Stripe is used for payment I tend to see it.
yieldcrv
Eventbrite has it, I only use that in the browser

go to more shows, I use Apple Pay web checkout all the time, probably 3-4 times a week.

I haven't seen it fail

KoftaBob
Do you use an adblocker on iOS? I've found that tapping "turn off content blocker" helps Apple Pay work correctly on a site.
oakwhiz
I find the timing interesting because coincidentally I'm having an issue with Stripe. I'm finding recently on multiple PCs that all Stripe checkouts are giving me a generic-sounding error ("We are unable to authenticate your payment method. Please choose a different payment method and try again.") no matter what credit card I use or whether or not uBlock Origin is turned on for the checkout site. However for some reason, I can still pay "unpaid invoices" through Stripe. When I complained to Stripe, I found that the support folks are not empowered to deal directly with any end-user customers on any technical issues, so it has to be done as a game of telephone through individual merchants, even though from my perspective it's a systematic problem with Stripe itself. This sounds like a lot of work to push the issue through support staff at merchants who may or may not be equipped to deal with more technically focused issues and may also be overloaded with other issues to deal with.

I did my own research and found that there could be a problem with 3D Secure and since I was not prompted about 3D Secure during checkout, that may very well be part of the problem. But since there are no visible unique ID numbers associated with these failures, I don't have any logs to pass up to support, it's all up to the merchant to dig through their Stripe account and look for the relevant info, etc. For one of the payments I had to make, I just used PayPal instead since I noticed that it happened to be another option. That's also a common pattern - everyone has to dual-home their payment processors or else a tremendous amount of "legitimate customers with money are being denied" risk is occupying one bucket.

Sadly, this is a user experience that I find typical of just about any online payment processing flows. I keep wondering, why is payment processing always so terrible?

deepnet
I found customers with popup blocking (firefox) were causing bank verification to fail.
oakwhiz
Are there any situations where popups are blocked but no indicator appears in the browser?
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entropy273
This is 100% a 3DS/SCA issue. Are all of your cards one brand type (Mastercard, Visa, or AMEX)?
oakwhiz
Yes, all the cards that I tried were Mastercard.
b20000
paypal has been broken for 20 years
motbus3
I don't know about pay now button but given the loads of problems I had with paypal last year I just stopped using it.

Last year, 9/10 purchases failed causing me to wait for money to be returned for almost a week each time.

The last time was a hotel reservation in the order of a 4 digits euros.

zackees
Paypal is destroying themselves. I went to J6 protest. Didn’t go to the hot area, but one block away.

Both personal and business accounts were closed with paypal. Personal venmo was cancelled.

The letter they sent me said that they couldn’t tell me why my accounts were closed, and any further correspondence would be ignored unless I contacted their legal department.

It looks like the wrong people are now running the company.

urbandw311er
Wait what? Why is it that you think PayPal knew you had attended those protests?
zackees
Because I said so on twitter?
diogenescynic
PayPal is too stupid to even implement virtual accounts or virtual wallets for large businesses to manage their deposits more efficiently. It’s still a huge manual process where you have to email them about your multi-million dollar deposit and then it takes days for them to apply the funds to your account.

I blame this on the leadership at PayPal who are abysmal and they promote incompetent people while most of the talent has left. It’s a dead company. Checkout.com, Stripe, ApplePay and all the others are eating PayPal alive.

PayPal is the next Yahoo.

blablabla123
I have since half a year or more problems with some PayPal payments - no matter which browser I try.