Paypal broken for ten days – costing merchants a fortune
Paypal has become a way of life for many, with everyone from eBay users (naturally) to self-employed people using it as a simple and effective way of being paid by many people all over the world. Which is great for Paypal, but also creates a huge problem when something goes wrong, as it has done now.
Paypal is by far the easiest method for people in one country to accept payments from other people all around the world. The two most obvious examples of this are for merchants selling stuff over the Internet, especially through Web destinations such as eBay, and for people employed from afar, who may need to be paid by people in multiple countries.
However, problems do occur, and have been well documented over the past few years. From fraud, poor customer service and much more, Paypal does have its problems. The latest one is a bug, seemingly simple to fix which started to appear about 10 days ago, but which has still yet to have been attended to by Paypal.
This issue relates to a problem when a seller tries to accept a payment from someone not residing in the same country as them. Due to what appears to be a simple issue with a drop down menu, this means literally millions of merchants, many of whom rely on Paypal for their income, are losing thousands of dollars.
One such merchant, Clicky CEO Sean Hammons, has posted a detailed explanation of the problem, and Paypal’s response, or lack of it, in a blog post. What is making him, and many others angry is the supposed lack of response and a fix to an issue that could lose the company many customers.
Paypal took seven days to respond to the issue, and now, 4 days on from then, the problem still exists. The big question has to be why? Paypal is a huge company making an absolute fortune, and you would think that it’s primary objective is to keep its customers happy, but maybe not.
What is bizarre is that as Techcrunch point out, the issue is probably really simple to fix, and in fact would take less time to sort out than the blog post written to explain the problem.
With eBay rumoured to be proposing Paypal becoming the only payment option available on the site, this issue, and Paypal’s failed response time to it will not fill anyone with much confidence.
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May 27th, 2008
The above is not the only problem currently. They also are not collecting handling fees. For years I have had my website set up to handle a base handling fee with a postage add on per item based on the requirements of the individual items. Due to the mix of products with price not relating to shipping costs, this system has worked well until May 15, 2008. But now I am losing my handling fee on every order and I am appalled to hear that there are other issues going on that I wasn’t even aware of. Dios mio! One has to wonder if their system has been breached by a hacker and if so is anything safe with them–better go transfer my funds from my account right now!
May 28th, 2008
There are a lot of current issues with subscriptions on PayPal also going on since May 15th. The ones we have encountered so far:
- Duplicate payments being made on subscription payments (yes, the customer geets charged twice erroneously)
- Cannot cancel subscriptions
- Subscription payments do not have a subscription ID and other details when viewed on the live site
- Phantom subscription appearing with status of instead of Active or Cancelled. The subscription does not have an associated payment. However, a payment failure notification was sent.
- The SOAP API does not provide subscription information for subscription payments. Not does it provide the options and custom field. Therefore the payment cannot be matched with a subscription and the user loses access.
- No emails for subscription payments
- No IPN notifications for subscription failures
- IPN payment failure notices for payments made days ago
And each day the list gets longer! And the the onlly communication or response from PayPal is the scripted “we are sorry for the inconvenience” and “our engineers are working on it”.
May 29th, 2008
It looks like they have fixed the subscription issues that I mentioned in a previous post. The one outstanding thing necessary was to clean up the duplicate payments by issuing refunds.
Regards
Kevin
January 17th, 2011
Yups, this is a problem that most people today face.You really hit the nail on the head.
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