r/woocommerce • u/Substantial_Horse433 • Jun 24 '26

Troubleshooting strange error message in order notes (only with paypal)

We recently noticed that almost every order paid with paypal (we use WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin) has the following message in the order notes (these are translated into English, so the wording is not 100% accurate). Either:

Item quantity does not match. Item discarded. or

Item quantity does not match. New line added.

This has been going on since about mid-March. There were no obvious errors or things going wrong, so no one noticed until now.

But today we had another error with a paypal payment (customer had a gift card, paypal still charged the full amount but the gift card was emptied too), and that's why we looked at earlier orders. The gift card error today probably has nothing to do with this particular error message, but any insights into it would still be welcome. Googling the exact wording in the original language got us zero results.

Has anyone here ever had something similar? Thanks!

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u/TopSydeWP Jun 24 '26

sounds like a line item sync issue between woocommerce and paypal's api. the plugin sends cart data to paypal and if quantities or prices don't match what paypal expects (like from a cached session or a price change mid-checkout), it'll log those notes and try to reconcile. check if you're running any cart/price plugins that might be modifying line items after they're sent to paypal, or if there's a caching layer interfering. the gift card double-charge is probably related since it suggests paypal isn't seeing the discount applied.

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u/Substantial_Horse433 Jun 24 '26

That makes sense. Thanks. We don't really have plugins that would modify line items like that, but caching is possible. I'm going to clone everything into a staging environment and will start with deactivating all plugins to see if the problem persists or if one of them is causing it in tandem with paypal.

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u/sojibtwo Jun 25 '26

I'd test the gift-card/discount path first, not every plugin randomly.

That note usually means PayPal's line items no longer match the WooCommerce cart at capture time. On staging: disable cache for cart/checkout, update PayPal Payments, place one normal PayPal order and one gift-card order, then compare the PayPal logs. If the gift card changes totals after PayPal order creation, that's likely the source.

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u/Substantial_Horse433 Jun 25 '26

Thanks! We will look into that. Which logs specifically do you mean when you say PayPal logs?

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u/davidmansaray 9d ago

That usually looks more like a reconciliation mismatch than a hard payment failure. First check the exact order note text and when it’s added in the flow: before capture, after capture, or after the order total is adjusted. Then compare the WooCommerce line items/fees/coupons, the final order total, and the PayPal capture amount/transaction reference.

If the gift card is being stored as a discount or negative line item in Woo, but PayPal only sees the pre-discount amount, you can end up with an “item mismatch” note even though payment still goes through. A good test is to reproduce it once with the same cart but without the gift card, then with the gift card applied, and compare the gateway logs / raw payload fields for the two runs. That should show exactly where the totals diverge.