Woocommerce - getting a 'Please choose product options by visiting..' error on checkout page

[sarammog]

Hi

On one of our sites - bradfordwalking.org. We’ve recently started getting this error message on the checkout.

When you are on the checkout page, and select a payment option, the error message appears at the top of the page.

It seems to be since we updated from 6.8.5 after getting that critical error on all our sites a few weeks ago. Currently all themes and plugins are up to date.

It’s a variable product that has options for Walk Date and Pickup Location. Both are selected before it lets you add to cart.

From testing, I deactivated all plugins on the site other than the core woocommerce plugin and it still happens. Changing the theme over to the default 2025 theme stops it from happening.

I’ve also discovered that if you wipe all cookies and cache for the site, it works fine until you delete a product from your basket. After this, adding another product to the basket results in the error message coming back once you select a payment option again on the checkout page.

I followed a bunch of tests suggested by woocommerce support and they said to check for javascript errors on the page and I’m getting the following if any is relevant…

But I’m still getting errors in the default 2025 theme…

And a second check back in Pro gave less errors…

We’re not getting this on any of our other woocommerce sites but none of those use variable products.

Any ideas?

[sarammog]

Woocommerce support has got back to me and flagged an issue with the theme. Two out of date page templates:

1. Outdated template overrides : Your Pro theme has two outdated WooCommerce templates ( single-product/tabs/tabs.php at version 3.8.0 vs core 9.8.0, and single-product-reviews.php at version 4.3.0 vs core 9.7.0). These should be updated to avoid further issues.

[sarammog]

They gave me some instructions for manually updating those files and it’s not made a difference.

[ruenel]

Hey @sarammog,

We would be happy to double check your site if we can log in. You can create a secure note in your next reply with the following info:
– Link to your site
– WP login URL
– WP username
– WP password
– WP Administrator Role
– Confirmation that we can access and make changes to your site

To know how to create a secure note, please check this out: How The Forum Works

Best Regards.

[sarammog]

I’ve made a copy of the site on a domain we use for testing and development. Details attached in a secure note.

[sarammog]

Okay. PayPal after blaming everyone else, have finally admitted there’s an issue with their PayPal Payments plugin for WooCommerce.

I’ve been given a functions.php snippet that has patched it and PayPal are apparently going to patch it eventually.

This seems to have fixed the issue. Here’s what they said…

The real culprit is a confirmed bug in WooCommerce PayPal Payments . We’ve had multiple merchants report this exact same issue recently, and the development team has confirmed it and is working on a fix.

What’s happening is the PayPal plugin runs a background “cart simulation” on variable product pages to calculate Pay Later messaging. A recent change accidentally stopped hiding the internal validation notice this simulation creates, so the “Please choose product options” error is now being shown to your customers when it should remain invisible. This also explains why clearing cookies temporarily helped and why the error came back when products were removed and re-added.

The comment I posted earlier from them about outdated template overrides in the theme may still need addressing but didn’t seem to make any difference when I manually updated them in the test site.

[prakash_s]

Hello @sarammog,

Thanks for the update and for sharing PayPal’s findings. That explanation makes sense, and I’m glad the functions.php patch resolved the issue on your site. It does appear the main problem was caused by a bug in the WooCommerce PayPal Payments plugin rather than the theme itself. Hopefully PayPal releases an official fix soon. Thanks again for sharing this information — it will be helpful for others experiencing the same issue.

Thanks