Re: PayPal changes ship to address entered in ZenCart

I've been having an issue for a long time. What happens is someone puts in their correct shipping address in my website cart then is sent to PayPal to pay. The problem here is they have a bad address in PayPal and when PayPal takes them back to the website to complete the purchase, PayPal changes the address they originally entered into the cart to the bad address that was in PayPal. This happens at least several times a week on people's orders sometimes they catch it sometimes they don't. If a package goes to a bad address they file a dispute and it's getting to be a real pain. Does anyone know why PayPal is going back and changing the address they originally put in and does anyone know how I can stop that?

My temporary solution was to put in checkout instructions and red bold print telling people to first go into PayPal and delete any bad addresses. The problem there is no one reads anything so everyone misses it.

Any help on this is really appreciated!!

(ZenCart v 1.5.5e)

Unfortunately, with your older version of ZC and PayPal, you may not find anyone with a setup that can help you with your problem. Also, you as the merchant do not have a "Switch" at PayPal that can turn off PayPal's address override feature.

I don't know where or if you can find the code, but some versions of the API have:

<input type="hidden" name="address_override" value="0">
```somewhere in the code.  Perhaps someone more familiar can point you to the correct file.

Changing the 0 to a 1 (if it's available in your version) will override PayPal's address and use that of your customer.

All that being said, you really need to upgrade as your version of Zen Cart is very old and PayPal will be dropping your API in the near future (announced by PayPal in 2023).  Non-Zen Cart users reported a 21% increase in processing errors in Q2 of 2024. If I were into assuming, I would bet that a portion of those was the address problem.