[Plugin: WordPress Simple Paypal Shopping Cart] Get options from ACF checkbox

So I’m using WP Simple Paypal Shopping Cart with 2 variation control selectors. The variations I have are ‘Format’ and ‘Store’, the values for which I’m pulling from 2 Advanced Custom Fields on the post backend. ‘Format’ is using a check box field and Store is just a regular text field.

The Store field is just a comma separated list which is being pulled and displayed correctly, it’s the checkbox field Format that I’m having issues with. The values get pulled correctly from the post but they’re not being displayed in the select menu even though it’s being output as a non formatted list the same as the Stores values.

My template code:

<?php
$productid =  get_the_title($post->ID);
$price = '5';
$variation = the_field('format');
$variation2 = get_field('stores');

echo print_wp_cart_button_for_product("$productid", "$price", "", "$variation", "$variation2" ); ?>

How it’s displaying

Link

Should be noted I changed the required format of ‘|’ separated list for variations to comma separated in the plugin code, thinking this would help as default output of checkbox list is comma separated.

If anyone could point out where I’m noob-ing out/how can I get my checkbox values to display in the variation select that would be ace 🙂
Thanks in advance!