Error on PayPal Checkout Page: Things don't appear to be working at the moment. Please try again later.

Problem

You have set up your PayPal account to integrate with FormSmarts, but whenever you submit a form and try to check out, you get the following error from PayPal: “Things don't appear to be working at the moment. Please try again later”.

Solution

If the PayPal URL in the address bar of your browser contains the snippet code=EWP_SETTINGS, PayPal blocked the payment because the Block Non-encrypted Website Payment setting of your PayPal account is turned on.

Encrypted Website Payments - PayPal Settings

Turn off Block Non-encrypted Website Payment to allow FormSmarts payments to go through:

  1. Log in to your PayPal account
  2. Go to the Website Payment Preferences of your PayPal profile
  3. Scroll/swipe down to the Encrypted Website Payments section
  4. Set Block Non-encrypted Website Payment to Off
  5. Click the Save button

If you accept payments via PayPal that do not go through FormSmarts, do not disable Block Non-encrypted Website Payments unless you understand the security implications outlined below.

Understanding PayPal's Encrypted Website Payments Setting

When the Encrypted Website Payments setting is turned off, the details of a payment due can easily be modified in the HTML source of a web page, allowing a fraudster to change the amount due, currency or receiver of a payment before the data is submitted to PayPal.

When the setting is on, the payment details are encrypted with a secret key that is only known to the seller and PayPal so that the data cannot be changed undetected.

Because FormSmarts knows the details of all the fees and pricing options associated with a FormSmarts form and can authenticate and validate payments with PayPal, we can automatically verify1 that each payment received by a customer is consistent with the amount due, etc. This verification process does not rely on PayPal's Encrypted Website Payments and we do not support this feature.

If you are receiving payments to your PayPal account in addition to those made via FormSmarts, you need to manually verify that each of these payments corresponds to the amount due before providing the service or fulfilling the order.

  1. Current PayPal integration (a.k.a. Advanced PayPal Integration) and SuperCart only. The now-retired Basic PayPal Integration did not attempt to validate payments.