Hi @jestermgee
I understand your concern about needing the country with your PayPal transactions. Since you’re selling virtual products and have disabled shipping, the address details might not be passed to PayPal by default.
Just to confirm, are you using the PayPal for WooCommerce Payments extension? If so, this documentation here should help.
Looking forward to your response.
Thread Starter
Jason
(@jestermgee)
Hello. Yes I am using that PayPal module and I have read the section on the need for PayPal to enable the Billing Address Feature. I have been in contact with PayPal but it took over a day of explanation tand so far 2 different support agents to even get someone to understand what I was asking, I have been put onto an account manager and still awaiting contact back.
I am wanting to know if having PayPal enable the “Billing Address Feature” will resolve this issue?
Reading the info it states it will allow the billing address to be populated by PayPal but doesn’t mention anything about the info being sent to PayPal. Would this also then appear on the PayPal order?
I would think surely for digital products there is still a need to have the customers address info recorded for tax reasons, this was achieved with my old Joomla plugin but that used an older method of PayPal integration. Really need to solve this one tho as I have 30+ orders now with no way to know via my accounting system where the payments have come from.
Thread Starter
Jason
(@jestermgee)
So, PayPal has enabled the Billing Address Feature and nope, nothing is appearing even still.
I have done a few checkouts with my personal paypal account and absolutely no sign of where in the world I am paying from, no address, no country codes, nothing!
I cannot figure out why the address information from an order would not be sent to PayPal. This is important and required for a business. What else can I check? I REALLY need to solve this as it’s now a live site and I cannot determine any tax calculations for payments now
Thread Starter
Jason
(@jestermgee)
Just to clarify in the hope there is a quick solution:
– This is a digital store only so I do not ship anything physical.
– I have shipping disabled in Woo
– What I would like tho is for the Billing Address to appear as the shipping address in PayPal
The reason I need this is so I can determine tax for payments easily and also, generate reports based on location.
Hi @jestermgee
Thank you for the additional details, this helps us understand more about the situation.
I am wanting to know if having PayPal enable the “Billing Address Feature” will resolve this issue?
Regarding your question, I understand that your checkout process doesn’t save billing details when customers pay through PayPal, correct? By default, WooCommerce manages separate billing and shipping details for orders. But with your shop’s approach, it’s leaning towards non-checkout pages as indicated here.
PayPal usually has the customer’s billing information through their account. So if PayPal’s “Billing Address Feature” is enabled, the checkout fields should be automatically filled in with the billing information from PayPal. This data will then be saved in the order details, which you can find under WooCommerce > Orders. You’ll have to simply select an order from your dashboard to view the billing information.
More about the order details through WooCommerce can be found on this documentation. Note that if you’re gathering billing details on your checkout page, it should be found here.
For checkout pages, we recommend still requiring the necessary billing details before allowing payment through PayPal, as indicated here.
Additionally, the built-in analytics tool may also be helpful for gathering information you need once everything is setup: WooCommerce Analytics.
Hope this helps.
Thread Starter
Jason
(@jestermgee)
Regarding your question, I understand that your checkout process doesn’t save billing details when customers pay through PayPal, correct?
No, the issue is, as stated, there are no details for the user sent to PAYPAL such as the shipping address because I am not shipping products, they are virtual. Not sure why this is a hard one to understand.
In PayPal when I view a transaction, previous ecommerce systems have used even when a product is downloadable the shipping address info appears on the paypal transaction so I have a record at least of the country of payment. This was usually the users paypal address.
What I am hoping for is the BILLING ADDRESS entered at checkout within WOO would be sent to paypal to be recorded. Because my last ecommerce system was very simple and did not have good reporting, I designed my accounting system around paypal activity statements which had all the info needed to parse and generate detailed reports. This is now all missing as I cannot see the country of the payment.
Reports generated out of Woo Analytics don’t contain GST fields or paypal fees for transactions either so I cannot easily calculate that from those reports.
The TLDR is simply, how can I get the country of the user (at a minimum) appear in PayPal for a transaction?
Hi @jestermgee ,
I totally get how important it is to have customer address details—especially the country—recorded in PayPal transactions for your virtual product store. By default, PayPal doesn’t collect billing or shipping addresses for virtual products, which can make things tricky for record-keeping and staying compliant with legal requirements.
The good news is that PayPal can actually configure your account to accept billing addresses for virtual products. I’d recommend reaching out to PayPal Merchant Support. They can guide you on the best way to handle virtual products while still collecting customer address data.
In fact, there’s a helpful thread on this topic: PayPal Community – Missing Customer’s Billing/Shipping Address in WooCommerce. It mentions that PayPal can manually enable the billing address feature for cases like this.
If that doesn’t work out, there’s an alternative solution in WooCommerce. You can disable the “Virtual” option for your products. This makes WooCommerce treat them like physical items, so it collects and sends shipping address info to PayPal.
Since there’s no real shipping involved, WooCommerce will just use the billing address as the shipping address. However, An additional filter like this would then be needed to autocomplete “downloadable” product orders for payments via PayPal.
I hope this helps simplify things for you!
Thread Starter
Jason
(@jestermgee)
I have already had this feature enabled and this is sadly again wrong, this addressed the issue where PAYPAL is not sending to WOO, not the other way around.
Since it’s pretty clear I will not find anyone that understands the issue let alone find an actual fix I have simply had to work around this major limitation and hope to high hell if I receive an audit, this missing information is not an issue.
Basically, I have to install an export order plugin that I can configure to export all the required info from woo then use the one single piece of useful info that IS sent to PayPal being the order number to match the woo order to PayPal transaction details and provide the required country code. This is working so I have my issue solved, just a shame this can not be done in a more elegant way.
Hi @jestermgee,
I see you’ve been working diligently to ensure accurate customer address details, particularly the country code, for PayPal transactions in your virtual product store. It’s great to hear that you’ve found a solution by exporting order data from WooCommerce and cross-referencing it with PayPal transactions using the order number.
If the recommendation above doesn’t help, this workaround can still be a practical way to align the two systems and meet your compliance and record-keeping needs.
Please let us know if you have any other questions. I’m here to help with anything you need!
