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Unable to process orders from U.S. Virgin Islands


MaureenT

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I am posting this for a client whose Web site I built. Her site accepts orders from the U.S. and all U.S. Territories. She has run into a problem with orders from the U.S. Virgin Islands. While orders from other U.S. Territories, such as Puerto Rico and Guam, appear to go through the PayPal payment process correctly, all Virgin Island addresses are being rejected by PayPal as invalid. Whenever the customer attempts to confirm the order (go to PayPal), PayPal gives the following error message: "Unable to process payment. Please contact the merchant as the shipping address provided by the merchant is invalid, and the merchant has requested that your order must be shipped to that address." We have run tests with valid Virgin Islands addresses, but we always get the same result.

 

I fear that I may know what the problem is, but I wanted to find out if anyone here can confirm it or has a different answer.

 

To process shipping fees with their API, USPS requires the following for U.S. Virgin Island addresses:

 

State: VI

Country: United States

 

My concern is that PayPal requires something different, such as "USVI" for the "state" abbreviation. Does it accept the Virgin Islands as a United States address?

 

Again, this is only happening with Virgin Islands orders.

 

http://www.danielles-chocolates.com/catalog/

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Orders from the other U.S. Territories don't have this problem, including tiny American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands, so I really don't think it's a case of PayPal not allowing orders from the U.S. Virgin Islands. You can't go by PayPal's list of countries because these are U.S. Territories and, therefore, are not listed there as separate countries. For instance, it does not list Puerto Rico, yet orders from Puerto Rico addresses do not run into this same problem. They go right to the PayPal login screen, as they should.

 

I've run further tests and learned that orders from some places in the Virgin Islands will process, for example from the town of Kingshill on Saint Croix, but all test orders from Saint Thomas and Saint John have failed so far.

 

On the Pay Pal website you'll find a list of countries they operate in (allow orders from). I think it's a fairly good guess that they don't allow orders from the US Virgin Islands.

 

Vger

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When the client contacted PayPal, they told her that because the problem happens before the customer enters any info on the PayPal site, they can't find the rejected attempts. They told her that it may have something to do with the site's address verification process and that she should ask me (the Web designer) about it.

 

I have sent my own query to PayPal and am waiting to hear back.

 

Hi

 

What has Paypal said?

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