Major Problem for German Paypal users!

[Peter Walker]

Hi,
I run an international online forum http://www.rifeforum.com with a premium service which members can pay for via PayPal.

As I am physically based in Germany and have a German verified Paypal account which I use with my forum.

The website is in English and 80% of the members live in the USA. I recently noticed that the number of customers for the service dropped off to almost zero with the only new customers being Germans. After someone complained that the paypal site was appearing in German, I tested it myself. Not only does it appear in German, there is no option to change the language to English resulting in no sales as the potential customers do not understand the order page.

Test it yourself, here is an example link to my paypal order page.

https://www.paypal.com/xclick/[email protected]&no_note=1&tax=0&item_name=Test%20Order%20Page

When I initially started using PayPal in this way, the Paypal site appeared in English and all worked well.

Now, only a German page appears with not even an option to switch to English. The fact that customers cannot even choose a different language makes it MUCH WORSE!

Normally, such websites choose the displayed language based on the browser settings, not so this page.

This change was made by Paypal and has cost me a lot of money in lost orders.

I have reported this to Paypal and this is their answer:

I think I have discovered what is causing your problem. You are going to have to edit your payment buttons on your web site to read English.
When creating a payment button for your website (Shopping Cart, Buy Now, Donation, or Subscription), your language preference in your profile will be the default language of the button. If you would like to override the language preference during the button creation, you need to change the 'Buyer's Country'.

For example, if you want your Shopping Cart to be in German, you need to select the default Buyer Country as 'Germany' when creating the button.

Selecting the Buyer Country of 'Germany' will also change the button image from saying 'Add to Cart' in English, to saying 'Add to Cart' in German.

If you would like to have your payment buttons in English, German, and
French, you will need to create three buttons for each product that you are selling; one for each language. When a Buyer clicks on your payment button, the first payment screen they see will be in the language you selected either in your profile or when creating the button. If the Buyer is an existing PayPal member, the language of the page may change at the time they log in, depending on their personal language preferences.

However, this does not help me as the coding for linking to Paypal from vBulletin is handled automatically and I do not know how to correct it.

I wrote a support ticket to the vBulletin staff explaining the situation as follows:

Peter Walker
Nov 04th '06 08:33pm
I run an English language forum (http://www.rifeforum.com) with most of my members being English speakers. My Paypal account is based in Germany (where I reside) although I have set everything in my paypal profile to English.

When my forum members try to order a paid subscription via Paypal, they are ALWAYS sent to a German language Paypal page with no option to select English. This has resulted in virtually no new subscriptions as the members then just give up as they cannot understand the page.

I have been researching the problem with Paypal and they tell me there is a workaround requiring certain extra settings when calling the Paypal order page.

Here is a description from Paypal support:
"Depending on your native language, you can change this by using this simple line of code in your PayPal button: <input type="hidden" name="lc" value="EN"> This would change the language in your checkout flow to English. Currently the languages that we support are English (US,GB), Spanish (ES), German(DE), French(FR), Dutch(NL), Italian(IT).

It is therefore necessary to update the code in vBulletin to add the "lc" code when calling the Paypal website and I need help telling me how to do this.

As this issue affects ALL German verified paypal users (probably also French, Italian, Spanish, etc.) who want to sell to non-German speaking people, I hope a solution to this has been found on can be fixed quickly as I am loosing money while my customers cannot order subscriptions.

I am still using vBulletin 3.5.4 as my MySQL version is too old to run a later version of vBulletin.

Steve Machol
Nov 04th '06 09:39pm
I'm afraid this requires modifying the code, (i.e., 'hacks'.) We can't offer official support for code modifications or for forums running modified code. But we do have a hacking site and forums, however, with people that may be willing to help you with this.

Please visit http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/ and ask for help there in the appropriate forum. You will need to register on those forums and enter your forum email address on this form in order to get access:

http://www.vbulletin.com/members/membersupport_priority.php

All the best,
Steve Machol
Customer Support Manager, vBulletin

Peter Walker
Nov 05th '06 06:37am
Hi Steve,
I am not talking about a hacked feature here. The ability to accept payments via Paypal is very much a standard feature of vBulletin which now no longer works properly due to a change made by Paypal.

I strongly believe this is a problem that needs to be fixed in the official code as there are many people who run vBulletin forums in Germany who wish to be able to accept payments from non-Germans. This affects ALL forum owners with German PayPal accounts.

Regards

Peter

Steve Machol
Nov 05th '06 10:32am
Yes, it does require modifying the code to change this. Sorry I didn't make that clear.

Please feel free to make a feature request here:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=55

All the best,
Steve Machol
Customer Support Manager, vBulletin

I hope someone here can help resolve this problem as it affects all German Paypal users who run an English language forum. We are not talking about a hack here, but standard vBulletin code with an important feature for ordering paid subscriptions.

Regards

Peter

[Colin F]

Peter,

I've moved your post to a seperate thread.

First off, the link you provide does make the page show up in English for me.

Try this:
Edit your subscription_payment_paypal template and add this to the end:
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="US">

[Peter Walker]

Thanks Colin,
your added code seems to have fixed the problem.

Regards

Peter

[Steve Machol]

Good one Colin.