This is a very specific issue I experienced when integrating PayPal (website standard) with a form for simple online payments. I was using formspring.com to generate my form, but that doesn’t really matter. A form can pre-populate the fields in PayPal such as Price, Quantity, Name, Address and a host of other values.

I was having trouble getting the “Country” field to pass on from my form to PayPal when I found quite a simple solution. Basically the “Country” field can be very important because of currency and taxes, not to mention having the correct delivery address of the customer of course.

The problem with the “Country” field I experienced was caused by the fact that my form was sending the wrong value to PayPal.

I will explain: my form used Country Names = Country Values.

Therefore if a customer selected “Jamaica” as their “Country”, then the value sent to PayPal would also be “Jamaica”. Should be fine you might think…not so

PayPal only recognise the official ISO 2-letter country codes.  In this case “Jamaica” = “JM”

I have made this list available in CSV format for your convenience, it is taken directly from the ISO page but I took out one value because it was only a reference and would upset the form.

Here is the link to the CSV list >>

Another small point I would like to add is that if you want to apply taxes in PayPal, simply click on Profile > Selling Options > Selling Taxes and add the tax rates you want for each jurisdiction. These rates will be applied to everything that you sell through that merchant account.