Paypal recent Service Upgrade “IMMEDIATE ATTENTION REQUIRED: PayPal service upgrades”
You may have got an email recently from Paypal saying that they are upgrading their services and your website may be affected because you have used their Paypal gateway in your merchant ecommerce shop. A bit of an alarming message if you are not sure what they mean.
They also say that this change will take place on the 30th of September 2015 but they may have to bring that forward if required.
What it means for you and your Woocommerce site
If your Woocommerce website uses PayPal as a gateway then this could impact you. But the good news is that if you have woocommerce up to date then no changes needed on your website. You just need to check that your host supports the SHA-256 secure certificate that is now being used by PayPal.
The WooCommerce PayPal Standard Gateway itself requires no changes but check your hosts can support the change. – view Woocommerce’s statement here
How to check you are covered
Woocommerce has tried to make it as easy as possible to check that you are supported.
Choose the download zip option on this page and then upload to your website as a new plugin.
Once activated you can then go to http://yoursite.com/?ipn-test=1 (replace yoursite.com with your own domain) and hopefully you should see a success message.
If not then contact your hosts to find out what they can do to support SHA-256 secure certificates
What happens if your hosts don’t support the new PayPal Certificate?
In the event that your host does not support SHA-256, customers will still be able to make payments on your website, but the PayPal IPN will not be able to update orders from ‘pending’ to ‘processing’ without manual intervention.
This could also mean that you don’t get email notifications so definitely worth checking that you are supported.
References:
- PayPal Security System Upgrade Guide: https://www.paypal-knowledge.com/resources/sites/PAYPAL/content/live/FAQ/1000/FAQ1766/en_US/2015%20Merchant%20Security%20System%20Upgrade%20Guide%20%28U.S.%20English%29.pdf
- PayPal 2015-2016 SSL Security Change Microsite: https://www.paypal-knowledge.com/infocenter/index?page=content&id=FAQ1766&expand=true&locale=en_US
- Woocommerce statement: http://docs.woothemes.com/document/paypal-update-for-sha-256/
- Test your hosts support for PayPal: https://gist.github.com/mikejolley/0941e0882efcad64ea40
It is important to keep Woocommerce and WordPress up to date. More information here on how it helps security, speed, compatibility and more.
