Error Code: 12114 Invalid Item URL. Transaction refused because of an invalid argument

Question

We use PayPal Express (along with other Gateways) in our ASP.Net Application. It is working fine, and we even received an order this morning via PayPal Express successfully.

However, one of our customer receives the following error message while checking out -

Invalid Item URL. Transaction refused because of an invalid argument. Error Code: 12114

Unfortunate, I could not find 12114 error code in API Error and Warning Codes

I'm wondering what might cause that error except from what is stated about.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with the PayPal API other than looking briefly at it, but I have quite a bit of experience in payments systems in general. Is there any facility for you to log ALL of the input parameters supplied to the failing API call? There are at least 250 error codes that are the result of failed input validation.

Check for all the items in the "Validation Errors" section in this link. https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/api/errorcodes/

Your customer could be submitting malformed or missing data that you haven't restricted on your end. Maybe it's a 6 digit zip code or a comma in a currency field. I've banged my head against the wall for days only to find out that the customer is using foreign language unicode characters. Also, pasting text from Word into a web page frequently results ` instead of ' as an apostrophe.

The only way to really track you problem down is to log all of the user submitted data with time stamps so you can go back and see for sure what is being submitted. But, please don't store payment information in a text file on your server. If the customer isn't submitting their payment info correctly, it's supposed to fail.

I wish you the best of luck.

Answer 2

how long is the url for the item?

i think paypal has a max length. but i'm unable to source anything on that error code.

could you try enabling IPN again and use this url

http://connectandtrade.com/store/payment-return/paypal-express it's probably not related, but might provide a clue in the logs.