PayPal Item Unit Cost

PayPal cares about item unit costs and making sure everything totals exactly. If not, it will reject the order. It’s a difference of models and fractional pennies. 

In this example order we have 4 items, 1 of which is free, so we end up sending PayPal a line item of 4 items for $89.95.

We have to give them a unit cost of each item, which breaks down to $22.4875. PayPal won’t allow fractional pennies, so we have to round up/round down.

To work around that, we round to a whole number to make the line items valid, and then we add our “fudge factor” so the item subtotals match the total of the order.

You have the following options to get rid of this 3rd line item of 2 cents:

1. Do nothing. Leave it alone.

2. Turn off item level detail. If you do that, we just send PayPal a total and it asks the customer to pay it. Most customers do NOT like this option, and we don’t recommend it.

3. Adjust your prices to a point where the most commonly ordered quantity divides out evenly. I would assume, given your offer, the most common quantity will be 4.  Based on that assumption, a price of 29.96 and 39.96 will break down into whole amounts and eliminate the need for this subtotal discount line item on PayPal. But, such a change might be undesirable if you’ve invested marketing or graphic design costs into the current pricing.

I’ll leave any decision to you. I don’t know what percentage of traffic is PayPal, and then what percentage of PayPal traffic would actually care about the 3rd line item. It might be significant. It might not. I don’t know. But, the PayPal is working.