Ah, the dreaded the postal code returned from PayPal did not match the cart message in ShopSite…

It can be confusing, annoying, and ultimately result in lost sales…

What really happens?

When a customer enters a ship to zip / postal code in the shopping cart that does not match the ship to zip code saved in their PayPal account, this stock warning message appears in the shopping cart.

ShopSite then updates the zip / postal code in the cart with the actual value returned by PayPal (i.e. the actual zip code saved in their PayPal account as the shipping address). But this may not be obvious to your customer.

Note: Version 12 of ShopSite actually ignores the “plus 4″ part of the zip code in determining whether to warn the customers and send them back to the cart. So that potential snag has been eliminated. But not the typo, wrong zip, etc… that sometimes gets entered on the cart page.

The easy fix

Make a simple change to the text:
Preferences -> Store Text -> Shopping Cart

The entered Postal Code did not match the value returned from PayPal.

to something like:

The shipping Postal Code in PayPal was different from the postal code you entered in the cart. The correct Postal Code has now been updated to match PayPal. Please click “Check Out With PayPal” to complete your order.

You can expand on this to possibly include a link explaining the issue, that the zip code in PayPal must be the shipping destination in your store for the payment method to work, etc…

…

We see this question a lot from merchants. Luckily a little re-wording, and you may help many customers who run into this issue.