PayPal is now up there with WordPress as far as platforms I really don’t like working with.

• PayPal’s documentation is a mess.
• When using PayPal’s sandbox accounts—with PayPal-generated test credit card numbers—I get response code 400 regularly, with no explanation why.
• After finally finding some test credit card numbers in the documentation and trying those, the transaction fails and the PayPal UI tells me I can’t use that credit card.
• Then there is this page that tells you any valid, randomly-generated card numbers should work in the sandbox.
• The randomly-generated numbers work sometimes. Other times you get a 401 Unauthorized response followed by a retry . . . which fails with a 400.

I’ve had maybe three test transactions work successfully and it’s not clear to me at all why the others didn’t.

Did I mention I’m using their “latest-and-greatest” checkout.js because it’s supposed to be so easy?

</rant>