Express checkout error

Dell offers express checkout from its cart page with Google Pay or PayPal. If Dell can’t pull a billing or shipping address from those accounts, though, it can’t let users use express checkout. Users can still pay with either—they just need to manually enter their address and select Google Pay or PayPal as their payment method in the regular checkout flow.

So how do we explain to users that they can’t pay with that payment method from cart, but they can in checkout?

The express checkout buttons in cart are proprietary, so I wasn’t able to relabel them to better manage users expectations–I had to work around them.

I knew the error message would be two-pronged: explaining that we couldn’t get the shipping or billing address and then informing the user that they could still pay with PayPal or Google Pay, but I didn’t know how didactic I’d need to be. I ran a usability test to understand users’ expectations.

As expected, users were confused about the disconnect between the CTA “Pay with PayPal” and the error message telling them they could still pay with PayPal. Fair enough. I refined the message so the address verification issue had a resolution: “We cannot verify your PayPal account’s shipping or billing address. You can still pay with PayPal if you manually enter the addresses at checkout and select PayPal as your payment method.”

100% of test participants were able to submit their order after receiving the error message. Explaining that users just needed to provide the address to use PayPal seemed to do the trick.