My Web project has multiple language support, that means, that a guy can choose the language he wants to see or experience my site, that a guy can be in Australia and be Spanish and choose to view my site in Spanish. You may wonder why I am explaining so much this, well, it seems that the guys from PayPal didn’t have that into account as if you do not tweak the form variables correctly, the front page of your checkout process will be displayed in the ASSUMED language by your location: if you are a Spanish in Australia and clicks the button to checkout in my site, PayPal will display their front page in Australian English, no matter who you are Spanish, Italian, or Japanese -can you imagine if you are in Japan and you are not Japanese?. And what does means? YOU LOOSE A SALE!

So, I look around the Web and found nothing at all. Just bits and pieces here and there, nobody gave me any solution at all just the one given by, even, the guys from PayPal:

Include a hidden field type named ‘lc’ and set it to the language you wish the page to view displayed (ie for Spanish language):

<input type="hidden" value="ES" name="lc" />

But that didn’t work, it just displayed a small dropdown box at the top right corner of the page… I kept searching the web… very frustrated I read an article from a guy that said that it was a problem with direct payments as we do not include the shipping information in it, there was nothing to do about it. So after a bit of studying the variables of PayPal’s Web Integration Manual I decided to give a try to the following set:

• I will tell PayPal not to ask for shipping, there is no shipping
• I will tell PayPal the language I want to use
• I will tell PayPal the character set I use for that language
• I will tell PayPal also the currency code I want to use (This is extra )

The resulting form was like this and believe me… IT WORKS:

<form action="https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr" id="paypalform" name="paypalform" method="post" style="display: block;" class="boxy-content">
<input type="hidden" value="2" id="rm" name="rm"/>
<input type="hidden" value="_xclick" id="cmd" name="cmd"/>
<input type="hidden" value="YOUR_PAYPAL_ID" id="business" name="business"/>
<input type="hidden" value="http://YOUR_SUCCESS_URL_PAGE" id="return" name="return"/>
<input type="hidden" value="http://YOUR_CANCEL_URL_PAGE" id="cancel_return" name="cancel_return"/>
<input type="hidden" value="http://YOUR_IPN_URL_VALIDATION" id="notify_url" name="notify_url"/>
<!-- THESE ARE THE IMPORTANT FIELDS TO KNOW -->
<input type="hidden" value="EUR" id="currency_code" name="currency_code"/>
<input type="hidden" value="ES" id="lc" name="lc"/>
<input type="hidden" value="1" id="no_shipping" name="no_shipping"/>
<input type="hidden" value="utf-8" id="charset" name="charset"/>
<!-- END OF IMPORTANT FIELDS -->
<input type="hidden" value="TEST_ITEM_NAME" id="item_name" name="item_name"/>
<input type="hidden" value="TEST_ITEM_NUMBER" id="item_number" name="item_number"/>
<input type="hidden" value="1.50" id="amount" name="amount"/>
</form>

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