WooCommerce PayPal Payments

Sorted it out for me, and helped me understand recaptcha better too.

Many thanks

We ran into an issue with our payment gateway that stopped some subscription renewals from processing. Krystain was fantastic to work with, quick to respond, thorough with testing, and got everything back up and running smoothly. Thanks so much, team!

I had a issue integration Google & Apple Pay, the support I received was quick, patient and professional.
The communication was stress free and a pleasurable experience.

Thank you to Jamie for your help

Last update auto-enabled 8 random payment gateways I never agreed to or configured. Lost my trust.

too many errors, too many failed payments, too many problems.

We ran into a tricky issue where Pay Later messaging was injected into Elementor loops and broke the layout across multiple shops.

Support was excellent. Krystian quickly understood the problem and guided us step by step to a clean solution using manual connection instead of the default onboarding.

Everything is now working as expected again.

Special thanks to Krystian for the clear and patient support.

I’m posting this after several (wasted) days of diagnosing sudden intermittent 503 errors on a live WooCommerce store.

To be completely transparent, this has been an extremely frustrating issue to solve, not because of complexity in WooCommerce itself (our first post-update suspect), but because of unexpected behaviour in this PayPal plugin that gives no clues in the UI. I am absolutely fuming about the grief this plugin has caused me via the heat I've had from my boss demanding a fix.

We originally adopted the WooCommerce PayPal Payments some years ago when it was recommended as the replacement for older PayPal integrations. At first it was a reliable upgrade, until the false orders started to hit ours and other Woocommerce sites in their hundreds. This was due to scammers abusing the plugin's inability to do any fraud checks on attempted orders before card transactions were presented. This was eventually fixed about 18 months ago and the failed order incidents stopped.

Our expectation was we now had a reliable, streamlined solution for taking payments with fraud protection at the point of sale. However, what we now appear to have is a much heavier plugin with behaviour that absolutely smashes a server's PHP workers.

Now take a look at the AJAX generated culprit...

/?wc-ajax=ppc-simulate-cart

This repeating and constant request was:

• occurring on product pages
• running even when PayPal buttons were disabled on product pages
• being triggered continuously per session

This caused a significant increase in the background PHP load leading to PHP worker exhaustion and most annoyingly for our customers, intermittent 503 errors during checkout. Thankfully some customers called up to make a payment manually, but who knows how many gave up?

My initial investigation was to start with the error logs and chase fixes from clues in there. But despite wasted time on various fix attempts, the 503 errors continued.

The true issue was only identified after liaising with our hosting support at Cloudways, who saw thousands of instances in the server's access logs for patterns such as:

POST /?wc-ajax=ppc-simulate-cart
(repeated continuously across sessions)

Before this pattern was identified, we had initially started to suspect hosting, infrastructure, and scaling issues resulting in a potentially unnecessary server upgrade. But we can live with that.

The 'simulate cart' behaviour was ultimately traced to the plugin's 'Pay later messaging' function enabled on product pages. Even with product page buttons disabled, this setting alone triggers background cart simulation via PayPal scripts! The fix was unbelievably simple - leave the 'Pay later messaging' ticked for cart and checkout and untick it for product pages.

This resulted in immediate reduction in AJAX activity and an end to the 503 errors under the same operating conditions.

I haven't had chance to find out if this behaviour has been previously documented. There's no obvious warning from the UI like in other plugins when they warn the user about resource hits if certain options are switched on. This is just too easy to misinterpret as a hosting or scaling issue and I've found out the hard way how capable it is of causing real production outages.

Furthermore, the plugin now feels significantly more complex and resource-heavy than expected for what should be a core payment integration. I would like to see PayPal:

1. Clearly document that 'Pay Later messaging' triggers background cart simulation
2. Provide an option to restrict PayPal scripts to cart/checkout only
3. Offer a lightweight mode for stores that only require core PayPal functionality
4. Be transparent about the performance implications of enabling these features

We chose this plugin because it was PayPal’s recommended solution but it's silently grown into a behemoth which is essentially, a sledgehammer to crack a nut. We originally started off with SagePay processing our card payments plus a simple PayPal plugin. After this experience, it’s difficult not to question whether it is still the most appropriate option for stores that prioritise stability and performance over additional features. We just need things secure and simple. Developers need to stop trying to reinvent the wheel with every update.

I hope my post helps others who may be suddenly encountering unexplained load or intermittent 503 errors, yet have made no significant changes to their Woocommerce operation.

Been using this plugin since its early days and I'm very satisfied with how easy it is to implement to any woo store. Moreover the support is absolutely stellar. Cheers and keep it up!!

Addressed my problem, and helped me with a couple of peripheral problems as well

I am new to this and have been struggling my way through setting up my site [Domain removed by moderators]. I ran into some goofiness with paypal and subscription products not working together and having to work with vaulting which makes about as much sense to me as mandarin chinese. I reached out and Jamie was awesome! Got back to me quick and was very professional, friendly and knowledgeable. Gave me clear steps to fix the issue and was thorough in following up and even added some extra guidance. THANK YOU!!