Reply To: Sandbox on Paypal

[Jason Caldwell]

I’ll see what we can do to improve that video. Honestly though, I stopped using their sandbox at all, so I’d need to run back through it all again in order to bring the video up-to-date. The last time I checked the Sandbox, it was still suffering from the same sort of problems that we saw long ago.

@csexplorer I suggest not using the PP sandbox at all. s2Member supports it, but it has been my experience that testing in the sandbox only leads to new problems; i.e., peculiarities in the sandbox that don’t exist on their production servers.

Most payment gateways work to provide a sandbox (or test mode) that is identical to the production servers. My feeling is that this was PayPal’s intention with their sandbox too, but that has not been the case at all. Often times, the sandbox behaves differently, which leads me to believe that it’s not only a sandbox for us (i.e., people using PayPal), but also for their developers who make changes to things all the time. I have no proof of that, but that is the way I perceive it; based on the last few years.

So instead of using the sandbox, I suggest running low-dollar test transactions for like $0.01. That way your tests are giving you the response that you can expect to see once you go live.