PayPal Email Payments + Language

[Extracold]

Background: English speaking, resident in Spain, invoicing to UK English clients varaible amounts for services (travel industry). As our address is Spain (& billing address for cards) we had to open a Spanish PayPal a/c. Language preference in Profile set to English. No need (And no skills) for a full on API cart based site.

Problem: When we send a PayPal email invoice the client gets the e-mail in English OK. When they click on the link to pay, though, the dialogue switches to Spanish.

Solution 1: Tell them to open a PayPal account. That will then seemingly lock their language to English. Bit of an imposition & another step in buying process...

Solution 2: Covering e-mail telling them as follows: On the invoice page to the right of the PayPal logo is a line “¿No dispone de una cuenta PayPal? Utilice su tarjeta de crédito o su cuenta bancaria (donde esté disponible).” This translates as “Don’t have a PayPal account? Utilise your credit card or bank card (whichever is available)”.
Click this link, then in the drop down box for Pais (Country) select “Reino Unido” (United Kingdom). Wait a second and the page should refresh and it should all then be in English.

Messy - I wouldn't do it - (and Im not sure it works)

Any other ideas / help please...!

[pp_rb]

If what you're sending in the email is just a payment link, you can add the "lc" or "country" variable to set the correct default language.

For example, if you typically send a link that looks like this:
www.paypal.com/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=YOUR_EMAIL_HERE&item_name=Service&amount=10&currency_code=GBP

You can modify it like this:
www.paypal.com/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=YOUR_EMAIL_HERE&item_name=Service&amount=10&currency_code=GBP&country=GB

Or this:
www.paypal.com/webscr?cmd=_xclick&business=YOUR_EMAIL_HERE&item_name=Service&amount=10&currency_code=GBP&lc=GB

If you're sending an Invoice from the Request Money section of the PayPal site, I'm not sure if you can make any modification to the country or language setting.

[Extracold]

pp-rb
Thanks - that seems to work though not sure if what I am seeing is being influenced by my cookies so will try it out tonight on some UK resident friends.

I suspect you are correct re not being able to influence the code sent from the PayPal e-mail invoice, as PayPal themselves generate that e-mail and (I assume) thus make it the default language from the PayPal site the business account is hosted on (hence my UK clients seing a Spanish payment dialogue).

This seems to be borne out by PayPal suppports reply today of "Thank you for contacting PayPal in relation to your PayPal account. Unfortunately, in PayPal Spain we do not have the option to send money request in English just in Spanish. In PayPal we are always trying to improve our services, and shortly we will be able to sort this issue out."

[pp_rb]

Actually, if you are sending the invoice to an existing PayPal account that is registered in England, it MIGHT display the automated email & payment page in the correct language for your client. (You might want to test this out.) However, if you're invoicing an email that is not registered with any PayPal account, then the email & payment pages would default to your account's language.

[Extracold]

Yep - the thing that threw us totally we was that there is a langauge option in your profile (choices US English or Spanish). We set that to English and the account shows (apart from a few low level help popups) in English. The e-mail invoice generated is in English, but what doesn't get changed is the screens the client gets when they click on the link sent to them.

It's shame that PayPal don't step up to this - all they seem to need is a front end to select your langauge as they seem to have all the other pages already.