Credit Card Approval Response Times Out

[faepigrl (Kimberley)]

It is on the PayPal side. I have found that PayPal and Epicor have done a poor job of notifying users of changes.

[josecgomez]

@Adam

That conversation has been started, but it seems that the process to move to PPCP isn’t established or well-known (we’re still waiting on what to do).

All you have to do is update the Paypay Side get the API keys and update your credit card configuration. I outlined the steps above

Credit Card Approval Response Times Out

Here’s instructions just don’t do it with a test account for production use your production PayPal and stated above use PPCP not PPCP_Test

The “hard” part is just getting the keys from paypal but honestly its pretty trivial over all.

But yes on the lack of communication.

[RBeaghan (Bob Beaghan)]

Sorry Jose, I’m trying to wrap my head around this. Is there another service that we have to sign up for (is PPCP a service?)? Or do we truly just go into our PayPal (Business) account to get the API keys you described?

We are invoiced monthly by Payflow Pro. What happens with that account? How will we be charged when using PPCP?

[shobdy (Shawn Hobdy)]

We tried doing the PayPal set up and found the ‘Advanced Credit and Debit Payments’ was not turned on.

We asked our third party person who handles PalPal and he sent the below.

I spoke to PayPal directly today and to upgrade to Advanced Credit and Debit Card Payments is a complete change and moves you to Paypal’s rates and processing directly. They said there is no issue on their end to continue using PayFlow Pro tied to our processing. I was told a change to ACDC as they call it is a new enrollment process, then its standard Paypal where funds have to be requested before they deposit etc.

Not sure what to make of this yet. Still waiting for clarification.

Was hoping it would be a simple matter to get that feature turned on.

[Joe_Turner]

We are on Kinetic (Cloud) and experiencing the same thing. Also receiving a lot of mixed messages on what we need to do.

Today though we got this update from Epicor Support:

"Got this update from another case abou the PayFlow Pro issues:

We’ve been informed that a solution has been deployed in the East region, which seems to have solved the issue in that area.

The team plans to deploy the change to a second regions (Nwest) tonight at 10pm CDT and then to the third and final region (West) tomorrow (Wednesday) night at 10pm CDT.

By Thursday morning it should be all over the regions and you can try once again the transactions.
"

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

@Adam

We have an escalated case with Epicor and they said we needed to upgrade to PPCP, requiring us to reach out to our CAM. That conversation has been started, but it seems that the process to move to PPCP isn’t established or well-known (we’re still waiting on what to do).

Frustrating. Rush orders are being held until the transaction can go through. Yesterday they couldn’t get the charge to post before end of day, so our staff went home. Not good.

Adam, what do you mean, “that process has been started” in the quote above?

[Adam (Adam Szymanski)]

@Adam

That conversation has been started

Epicor support told us we needed to reach out to our CAM. But, our CAM didn’t seem aware of what the process was to “upgrade” us to PPCP.

In the end, here is/was the issue: PayPal Payflow Pro server’s were getting updated. With the update, the new servers now required strict header parameters in the API call.

It seems that Epicor had been sending a header that was accepted on the old servers, but the new PayPal servers rejected it, causing the timeout. As the PayPal farm was being updated, more and more Epicor CC transactions were being rejected.

Over the past two days, Epicor has been pushing out an update (I’m guessing within CRE) that contained the strict headers. As the rollout went through, the timeout issues started to go away.

Now, PayPal has been very clear to us that PayFlow Pro is NOT going away anytime soon, contrary to Epicor’s email. For us, upgrading to PPCP isn’t a simple step, because we use PayFlow Pro as the GATEWAY, but TSIS as our processor (this was setup many years ago).

For us to setup things to use PPCP, we would need to use PayPal as both our GATEWAY and our PROCESSOR, something accounting isn’t ready to jump on.

I don’t know if Epicor will still sunset PayFlow Pro, but I’m guessing so, as it does use older API tech. We will need to shop around to figure out what gateway/processor options we have (in the event we don’t go with the PayPal route).

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

Adam “the truth” Szymanski, one love to ya!

Thank you for setting the record straight.

Who were you talking to? We have it on prem and I’m wondering how we would update it…

[Adam (Adam Szymanski)]

I was able to get some details from the PayFlow Pro customer support and in EpicCare I asked the contact to reach out to development and provide some technical details about what was going on to calm our nerves a bit.

We are also OnPrem with Kinetic 2024.1.x. We have CRE installed, but it connects to a Epicor cloud service to manage the CC tokens. From what I understand, is that cloud service that Epicor just patched. I don’t think you can run the cloud part of CRE locally (that is what ESDM used to do when we ran that locally).

West Coast (the last of 3) patch was supposed to go into place last night, I believe. Are you still seeing CC timeouts today?

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

Okay thank you Adam.

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

So is there some ongoing communication about whether it has been officially fixed on Epicor’s end or?

[Adam (Adam Szymanski)]

I don’t have anything more at the moment. I hope to talk to our CAM today. Yesterday we went almost all day without any timeout issues and we didn’t change anything in our environment.

[joel7901 (Joel Wellhoefer)]

I just reached out to Epicor today about this same issue. They claim it is now resolved. They copy/pasted some info from PayPal, and it sounds like it was an issue with their servers and the data Epicor was sending. Today is May 5, and our last transaction that timed out was April 29. We will keep an eye on transactions, but hopefully it’s fixed now.

From our support case:

As of last week, there as an on-going issue for several customers facing this exact same error message on 50% of their transactions.
A solution was deployed throughout Tuesday to Thursday for all regions having the problem which has been already stated by multiple customers that it has been resolved.

This was the reason:
"I just had a meeting with our PayFlow team who were able to identify that the errors you’re seeing here are 100% due to the content-type being passed to us on the payment requests ( “Content-Type: Content-Type: text/namevalue”). We were able to also see that the reason these errors are starting now is because of newer PayFlow servers that are being ramped up and put into traffic.

These new servers have strict enforcement requirements on the header parameters, while the older servers were ignoring the duplication in the header. Right now, we are at a 50% ramp-up to these new servers, which is why you’re seeing a 50% failure rate. We are able to see that the content-type duplication is how all of your incoming requests are being sent to us; so all of the requests that get to the new PayFlow servers are failing the content-type validation and getting an error, while the requests going to the older servers are passing.

Our teams let us know that these new servers could be ramped to 100% as early as next week. If this goes to 100% and there are no changes on your API requests, this will cause 100% of the payments to fail with this error. If you can update this parameter on your end ASAP and let me know when this is changed, I can let our teams know we are clear to proceed with this ramp-up. If you are not able to complete this, please let me know so we can tell our teams that we need to delay the ramp-up to 100%.

A change on your end will be required here, we are not able to change the enforcement requirements on the new servers for the PayFlow endpoints. "

The EPA deployed such changes to correct this problem. Therefore, my guess is that if there still issues with particular transactions or credit cards, re-entering them would clear any type of cache or stuck connection to make sure the authorization does not get blocked in first tries and the changes apply correctly in your end.

[utaylor (Utah Taylor)]

Wow, no idea how you got that level of response out of Epicor, but hats off to you and thank you so much for sharing it with us.