Incorrect state abbreviation being passed to ???

Hello,

I am running v1.3.9h and recently enabled the PayPal Express module. When testing PayPal, I did a couple test sales to Florida and Ohio and did not receive any error messages. Tonight, I tried a test sale to Texas using COWOA and selected the state from the drop-down list. When I clicked Continue, I received the following error message:

"Error encountered looking up tax amount The Ship To State (Te) is not valid"

Since "Te" is not the abbreviation for Texas, I suspect that's the issue, but I can't find where the "Te" is coming from. I checked Admin -> Locations / Taxes -> Zones and confirmed the abbreviation listed for Texas is listed as "TX". Any idea where the "Te" is coming from? I've shipped products to Texas before with no problem, but not with the PayPal Express checkout, though this error message comes on the screen prior to selecting the payment type. I am also running TaxCloud plugin v1.4.4 and have not had any problems since installing it about a year ago.

Thanks,

Jeff

I'm inclined to point fingers at TaxCloud and COWOA.

Regardless, v1.3.9 is from 5 years ago, and there have been hundreds of improvements in subsequent versions of Zen Cart released during those years. I can't remember what issues might have existed in your very old version to even guess at whether there's any real bug that might be at play there.

Stating the obvious, "Te" is the first two letters of "Texas" ...

Suspicion:
It sounds like your zencart is not forcing use of a drop-down-menu for selecting the Ship To State.

Details:
Instead of sending TaxCloud a two character abbreviation, such as TX, it is sending TaxCloud a full state name, in this case Texas, which TaxCloud truncates to just the first two characters, TE, which is not a valid state abbreviation.

Likely Fix:

1. Login to your Zen Cart backend admin screen;
2. Browse to Configuration >> Customers Details;
3. Look for the “State – Always display as pulldown?” and select “true” from there.

Also : agre with DrByte, time to update your installation of zencart. :smile:

Thanks for the replies. You make good points.

The upgrade to the latest version of Zen Cart will start shortly which will hopefully resolve this and the couple other issues I have posted recently. At a minimum, I'll be on the current version with all its enhancements.

Jeff

I had a similar problem running Zen Cart 1.51 and TaxCloud version: 1.5.2b_for_zc151

In admin my configuration for Always show State as pulldown is set to true.

I fixed the issue by writing a code in includes/modules/TaxCloud/func.taxcloud.php to convert the state name to a 2 char code before passing it to TaxCloud.

I made this change in 12/2013 and the store has functioned fine since then.

It did make me wonder how TaxCloud without this fix could be working for others - maybe there's something odd with my configuration