PayPal Shipping not available when trying to print USA Light Packet shipping label

[pcelectronik]

Hi,

I am trying to print a Light Packet USA label for a package with dimensions 14cm x 10cm x 2cm and a weight of 0.15kg since yesterday evening. I am still getting the same error message that says:

We are not able to generate your label at this time. Your PayPal account was not charged. Please try again later.

• PayPal Shipping is not available. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Light packet (4-6 days) was cheaper than USA air (4-10 days) and I would have to ask the customer to send me additional payment, which doesn't look nice. I printed 2 shipping labels last night just prior to this issue (1 XpressPost , 1 Expedited, both for Canada) and it worked perfectly.

Why isn't the Light Packet USA option working? I tried this option on two computers (my desktop and laptop) using the latest version of chrome.

Thanks for your time.

[pierrelebel]

"14cm x 10cm x 2cm"

should be OK but I suggest you change to 15cm x 10cm x 1.9cm  and see what happens

Good Luck

[pcelectronik]

Thanks for the reply.

Same error. I should mention I tried playing around with the weight and dimensions as you suggested.

I found this post that may explain the issue: http://community.ebay.ca/t5/Seller-Central/Light-Packet-Air-to-U-S-Is-it-gone-too/td-p/68541

Perhaps I have to go and pay in person at the post office?

[pierrelebel]

... or put $3.79 worth of stamp on the parcel and drop it in the mail box.

[pcelectronik]

...Yeah. Figured.

They should remove that option from eBay if it can't be printed online.

Thanks.

[pjcdn2005]

Light packet has always worked for me so I'm not sure why it isn't working for you now.

I have gotten that message in the past for various services and it can mean that there is a problem with

an international address although I don't remember it happening with a U.S. address.

[pjcdn2005]

or put $3.79 worth of stamp on the parcel and drop it in the mail box.

$5 in stamps would probably work better.

[pocomocomputing]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

Light packet has always worked for me so I'm not sure why it isn't working for you now.

I have gotten that message in the past for various services and it can mean that there is a problem with

an international address although I don't remember it happening with a U.S. address.

---

I have had issues with an address field being too long and had to shorten it. This has happened to long city names in the province of Quebec, typically Sainte Something de Something long names for a city. Changing the long name to an abbreviated name like Ste sometimes made it work.

I also had this same long name issue for cities or Provinces in France, Switzerland and even a couple of times to Australia. Each time I was able to shorten the name and make it work.

Typically the name was over 25-26 characters and I had to shorten to 21-22 characters.

I never had it happen to a USA destination.

@pcelectronik Where is the item going? Perhaps to a city with a long Spanish name or to a US territory?

[pjcdn2005]

I've had that happen too but in that situation I always (usually?) received a 'too many letters' message as soon as I went to go to the

second page. I've only gotten the message that OP mentioned on the last page.

[rose-dee]

I'm just grasping at straws, but have you by any chance recently updated to Windows 10?  Somebody mentioned on the boards a few days ago that Paypal does not yet support W10.  

At this past Wed. Board Hour, I asked Raphael whether he knew if or when it might be updated, and of course now that eBay and Paypal are separate he wasn't able to comment.  

[pocomocomputing]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

I've had that happen too but in that situation I always (usually?) received a 'too many letters' message as soon as I went to go to the

second page. I've only gotten the message that OP mentioned on the last page.

---

I never got too many letters message, just PayPal not working or not available or something like that. One of the first times it happened years ago, I waited the whole weekend. I finally posted in the forums asking if PayPal shipping was down and some helpful member posted that perhaps the name was too long and to shorten it.  I had this error 4-5 times after that and shortening something long always seemed to work. No way to know for sure because the issue went away as soon as I shortened the name.

I often wondered for international destinations if it was because of the International character set used in other languages (to accommodate accents and special characters not present in the English language). The characters get passed from the buyers address on file through eBay to PayPal and double the characters are sent when converted to the sellers web browser. You can't see the hidden special characters they do not appear.

I see this when using special characters on eBay. For example, the check mark symbol, √, when pasted into the eBay Custom Label field uses up 2 of the 50 characters available in the label but only shows as 1 visually. (I use the check mark as the first character in the custom label field to signify that the listing has been proofread. If listed but not proofread in detail, I use a ? so I know to go back and proofread in detail.)

I always wanted to try and analyze each address field data to see what character set is used when I have this PayPal error and see if it is double characters with hidden spaces. The problem happens so rarely and when it does, I never remember to check out the address fields. I just want to ship the item.

[lucitabby]

I got that error message last week also.

I finally figured out, in my case, I had an ext # at the end of the telephone # of the person I was mailing it to.

When I removed the ext number, it worked fine.

Very finicky sometimes.

[pjcdn2005]

I never got too many letters message,

That's odd...I've seen it quite a few times but then we already know that paypal and ebay are not known for their consistency.

[pjcdn2005]

I'm just grasping at straws, but have you by any chance recently updated to Windows 10?  Somebody mentioned on the boards a few days ago that Paypal does not yet support W10.

I was a little confused by that post on whether they were referring to the operating system windows 10 or the browser IE 10 because they did use the browser term at least once.

[pjcdn2005]

I wasn't aware of the hidden characters in some international addresses so that could have been the problem in some cases. But...anytime that I've had a problem with an international address, switching to paypal.com/shipnow solved it.  If the problem was that the address was too long, wouldn't it have been too long on shipnow as well?

[pocomocomputing]

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@pjcdn2005 wrote:

I wasn't aware of the hidden characters in some international addresses so that could have been the problem in some cases. But...anytime that I've had a problem with an international address, switching to paypal.com/shipnow solved it.  If the problem was that the address was too long, wouldn't it have been too long on shipnow as well?

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When you use shipnow, you had to copy/paste the name and address into the name and mailing address, no? The copy/paste might change the characters. Guessing now, as I said, I would need to have to have the situation happen.

I use discount postage stamps now for the past 3-4 years so I rarely use PayPal shipping except for Expedited Parcel when the total amount of postage stamps needed (I have low denomination stamps under 40 cents for the most part to get highest discount) cannot fit physically on a package.

The next time I get an Intentional sale, I will check the PayPal info passed and see if there is an international character set being used before marking it as shipped. I tried to check an old international sale that has been marked as shipped but do not see anything special.

[mr.elmwood]

Did you try a different browser?

[pocomocomputing]

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@mr.elmwood wrote:

Did you try a different browser?

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This issue happened in the past when I was using Internet Explorer and later when I used FireFox. As I posted, I rarely use PayPal shipping today.

@mr.elmwood, you must have a few international sales to countries (France, Switzerland). Have you never had issues with PayPal shipping saying that it is not available and not being able to print a label? It has happened to me a few times and the trick to shorten the address worked for me. Of course a few times, PayPal shipping was just not working and trying again in a few hours fixed it.

[tobyshitzu]

I got the same "unable to print" message just now.  It took me a seconn to see that the prefilled insurance value was over $100, and I wasn't paying for extra.  Instead of displaying a relevant message it goes to that screen when something is wrong, leaving you to think its not working.  Changed the value to $100 and good to go.

[mr.elmwood]

There is the name, address, city name length issues, but, they generate a different error message. I get specifically told, like today: "City name length cannot exceed 24 characters". I get told when I have too many characters in the name field, or address field. I do not get "not available".

"Paypal not available" causes me to use a different browser that always works. Usually it is Firefox that does not work causing the "not available" message and I switch to IE.