PayPal Error: Things don’t appear to be working at the moment

Customers are receiving errors: Things don’t appear to be working at the moment. Please try again later.

This error typically occurs for a couple of reasons –

Incorrect PayPal Settings

It’s possible you have entered your PayPal email address incorrectly. Please confirm your PayPal email address is entered correctly within Global Settings → Payment → Payment Methods → Paypal Standard

Encrypted Website Payments

Your customers may also see this if  Encrypted Website Payments are set to ON. Setting it to OFF will resolve the issue. This setting can be adjusted from within your PayPal account by following these steps :

(1) From your PayPal account, hover over the cog in the upper right corner of the screen and click Account Settings
(2) On the next screen, click Website Payments on the lower left
(3) On the right side of the screen, click Update next to “Website preferences”
(4) Make sure the option under “Encrypted website payments” is set to OFF

Can Fluent Forms work with Encrypted Website Payments enabled?

Yes. In order to utilize PayPal’s Encrypted Website Payments, you need to upload a public certificate to PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/how-do-i-create-a-public-certificate-for-use-with-paypal-encrypted-website-payments-ts1021

There is a problem with your PayPal account

This error can occur if your new account isn’t fully set up or if PayPal locked it down. Please reach out to PayPal to confirm your account is in good standing and there are no problems.

This document is inspired by: EDD