Account holder's phone number not picked up by PayPal Express

[lat9]

Running ZC 1.3.9f using PayPal EC sandbox.

When an account-holder chooses to use PayPal (selected from the checkout_payment page), their address and e-mail information is correctly picked up by PPEC ... but the phone number (which I've set as required) isn't.

The phone number, as stored in the database, is of the form 'nnn nnn nnnn' (blanks separating the digit blocks) and I see in the paypal log that the value is transferred with the [PHONENUM] tag. I noticed that PayPal 'wants' the phone number as 'nnn-nnn-nnnn' (hyphens separating the blocks); is it necessary for the phone number to be re-formatted in the database for the value to be accepted by PayPal?

[lat9]

OK, here's another change to /includes/modules/payment/paypalwpp.php (line 1490):

       $options['SHIPTOPHONENUM'] = $zc_getemail->fields['customers_telephone']; // lat9 ... was 'PHONENUM'

With this change, a logged-in customer who goes through the checkout process (going to PayPal from checkout_confirmation) has their phone number shown on the PayPal website.

[DrByte]

Have you tested whether that works accurately when using both virtual and physical goods?
The "SHIPTO" keys are only submitted when shipping is relevant. You'll note that they're segregated for that reason even in PayPal's documentation.

[lat9]

DrByte, I've checked this out with both physical and virtual carts; the phone number shows up on both.

[DrByte]

Further study of both the incomplete PayPal documentation and the actual API response parameters indicates that PHONENUM is not only deprecated but actually useless as a request parameter, but BOTH are used as response parameters, and not consistently.

One more bug to report to PayPal.