Paypal Debit & Credit Card delivery/shipping address issue

[lma3]

Description of issue:

When a customer pays using PayPal’s Debit & Credit card option, if they untick the checkbox for “deliver to billing address” after the billing address fields, no delivery address fields appear and the customer’s delivery address is automatically taken from the billing address.

What should happen:

When a customer pays using PayPal’s Debit & Credit card option, if they untick the checkbox for “deliver to billing address”, extra fields should appear within the Paypal modal for the customer to input their delivery address. Therefore allowing the customer to input a delivery address different

from their billing address if they want.

Troubleshooting process:

After testing this part of the payment process across multiple devices and browsers (Chrome, Safari and Firefox), I found this to function correctly on Safari and Firefox browsers. It also worked on Chrome when I was in Incognito mode. The one scenario I found where the delivery address fields don’t appear is on Chrome (not in Incognito mode), but only when I was testing this. When I tested this on Chrome on a new device that I hadn’t used to visit the site before, I didn’t experience the issue. This means that if you are a returning customer Paypal’s checkout services are recognising my device as a returning customer) Paypal doesn’t offer up the delivery address fields. I understand Paypal’s Express Checkout is intended to get the customer to complete any purchase in as few clicks and forms as possible. It does this by taking preferences from the customers Paypal account (stored addresses and bank details) and browser (past payments the customer has made on the site) to streamline the purchase for the customer. With this in mind, I can see why when I tested it on Chrome on my computer Paypal wasn’t offering delivery address fields as expected, as we have both previously provided a shipping address to the site, so I assume Paypal is trying to be helpful and make an efficient shopping experience by bypassing this step.

To further test this theory I removed stored cookies and cache from my Chrome browser, which in turn removed any of my previous purchasing preferences from the site. After this, the Paypal checkout functioned correctly (with delivery address fields appearing). So I know now that this issue only occurs for customers on Chrome when they have previously bought something from the shop.

Conclusion:

Any new customers paying using Paypal’s Debit or Credit card option will be shown the appropriate address fields to input both a delivery address and billing address through. The problem is only when a returning customer wants to buy something from the site on Chrome, but post it to an address that is different from their billing address. This is not ideal functionality for my client, is this a known issue for you and is there a fix in the pipeline? Is there anything I can implement on the site to bypass Paypal’s automatic settings?