Months of payment problems, extensive testing, and still no clear solution
I initially had a positive experience with the WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin and its support, which is why I previously left a positive review. Unfortunately, my experience changed significantly following a series of payment and checkout problems that began in late 2025. Around October 2025, my business revenue began falling dramatically. At first, I could not establish whether this was simply a business or marketing issue, or whether there was a problem with the payment system. I contacted Syde, the developers and support team behind the plugin, and was advised to update to the latest version of the plugin. I did so. Business improved somewhat, but revenue remained substantially below the levels I would normally expect. January is historically one of the strongest months of the year for my business. Instead, January was disastrous. This prompted me to look much more closely at the WooCommerce and payment logs. What I found was alarming. For a period of time, almost every credit-card payment attempt appeared to be failing. I raised this with support and was largely told that the problem was occurring on the customer’s bank or card-issuer side, with explanations such as declined transactions or suspected fraud. However, after approximately two months, the number of failed card payments dropped dramatically without any clear change that explained why. This made me question whether the explanation that the banks were primarily responsible had ever fully explained what I was seeing. Business nevertheless remained weak, which led me to investigate the PayPal payment flow more closely. One particularly confusing issue occurred when I opened the Basket page on my mobile phone and noticed messaging within the PayPal payment flow suggesting that the customer might need to pay significantly more than the displayed course price because of possible shipping and tax adjustments. My courses are digital products and I do not charge shipping. I asked Syde to explain this. Initially, I was told that the figure was related to PayPal Pay Later messaging. However, this explanation did not appear to match what I was actually seeing or how the payment flow was behaving. After further discussion, the issue appeared to be connected to the configuration of the payment and shipping flow rather than simply being a Pay Later calculation. I was eventually able to improve this part of the customer journey by enabling Pay Now Experience. However, changing settings in order to solve one problem appeared to introduce further questions and trade-offs. In my case, for example, the Basket Smart Button flow allows customers to complete payment without going through the same account-registration process as the standard Checkout flow. I repeatedly asked Syde to review my complete WooCommerce and PayPal configuration to make sure there were no conflicting or inappropriate settings. I was told that testing and checks had been carried out, but the subsequent discoveries made me question whether the full payment flow had actually been investigated thoroughly from the beginning. The plugin has a large number of settings and interactions involving WooCommerce checkout, PayPal buttons, shipping, digital products, account creation, Pay Now Experience, 3D Secure and other payment options. I do not expect every merchant to be an expert in these technical details. That is precisely why effective technical support is important. To be fair, Syde generally responded to my emails within their stated response timeframe. The problem, in my experience, was not simply the speed of replies. The problem was that, for many months, the replies did not produce a clear diagnosis or solution. I often felt that I was being required to carry out the investigation myself: checking logs, testing different settings, changing configurations, monitoring transactions and repeatedly reporting the results. The situation only appeared to change significantly after I made it clear that I was considering changing to another PayPal plugin and revising my previous positive review. At that point, Syde finally carried out more extensive testing and acknowledged that there was a genuine problem with the mobile checkout flow. They were able to reproduce a checkout validation issue on Android devices. However, my own subsequent testing showed that the issue was not confined to Android. I spent approximately four hours systematically testing the staging site using Safari and Chrome in private/incognito mode, on both desktop and iPhone. The results were inconsistent and concerning. On desktop, the PayPal and card payment flows generally completed successfully and displayed the expected Order Received confirmation. On mobile, however, I reproduced several problems: • Safari on iOS: PayPal payment through the Checkout page returned to the Checkout form and asked the customer to complete the details again, creating a payment loop instead of reaching the Order Received page. • Chrome on iOS: a PayPal payment through the Checkout page could be successfully completed, but the customer was then returned to the Checkout form rather than being shown the Order Received confirmation. • Chrome on iOS: a PayPal payment from the Basket could be successfully processed, but the customer was returned to the Basket page without an Order Received confirmation or notification. • Card payments through the Checkout page worked correctly on mobile during my testing. These findings are particularly concerning because, in some scenarios, the payment itself was successful but the customer was not shown a clear confirmation page. From the customer’s perspective, it could appear that the payment had failed, potentially encouraging them to try again. There were also differences in the availability of guest card payment through PayPal between desktop and mobile testing. On desktop, I was able to see an option allowing payment without creating a PayPal account. On mobile, that option was not consistently available. I appreciate that software bugs can occur and that reproducing a problem across different devices and configurations can sometimes be difficult. My criticism is not that a bug exists. My criticism is the amount of time it took before the existence of a genuine problem was acknowledged and properly investigated. I began raising concerns many months ago after seeing a dramatic and sustained decline in revenue and unusual payment behaviour. I repeatedly provided logs, descriptions, URLs, settings and test results. For a long time, the explanations focused on external factors such as customers’ banks or card issuers. Only after extensive persistence, repeated testing and the possibility that I might move to a competing plugin did the investigation appear to become sufficiently thorough. I have also since read other user reviews and found reports from users describing payment, checkout and support problems that appear similar in nature to some of the difficulties I have experienced. That further reduced my confidence that my experience was simply an isolated problem. My business has almost certainly lost sales during this period. I cannot quantify precisely how many, or attribute every lost sale solely to this plugin, but when a business experiences a major revenue decline at the same time as significant payment failures and inconsistent checkout behaviour, it is impossible to ignore the possibility that the payment system has contributed to the problem. At the time of writing, Syde’s team has acknowledged at least one genuine mobile checkout issue and says that the matter is under investigation. I hope they find and fix the underlying cause. I would prefer to continue using the plugin and to update this review positively if the problems are properly resolved. However, after spending months trying to understand these issues—and many additional hours personally testing payment flows—I need a reliable payment system that works consistently across desktop and mobile devices. If a clear and reliable solution is not provided, I will have little choice but to move to an alternative PayPal integration and update this review to reflect my full experience. My advice to other merchants is to test every payment flow yourself, particularly: desktop and mobile; PayPal and card payments; Basket Smart Buttons and Checkout buttons; guest checkout; successful payment redirects and Order Received confirmations. Do not assume that a successful payment alone means that the customer’s checkout experience has completed correctly.
teflonlineprocertification
August 20, 2026
|
2 replies
Timely and thorough support, thank you!
I’ve dealt with my fair share of challenges with changing payment processors, from Stripe to PayPal, so the broader journey with my website and member’s area hasn’t been smooth. However, I have been very happy with the quality of support I’ve received from the WooCommerce PayPal Payments team (Syde Support Team) and specifically Krystian! I’ve emailed with a variety of questions, many also asking for understanding and education on how to do things, and I’ve received timely and very thorough responses. You know how you can tell if a support team is trying to close the ticket as soon as possible just to get it off their plate? That has not been my experience with Krystian. I’ve felt that my questions have been received with care and he has even expressed curiosity about the bigger picture, leaving the door open for follow-up conversation. So thank you very much, Krystian!
katrin7
August 20, 2026
|
1 reply
