Comments on: PayPal: Ten Days And Counting To Fix Drop Down Menu Bug

By: screensaver maker

screensaver maker — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 03:59:36 +0000

They just do not care one bit about you, and their staff is clueless.

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:55:43 +0000

I came across SWREG. They have new pricing for 0% (http://usd.swre...ntecommerce.htm). The features offered make it pretty interesting.

Mark

By: The PayPal bugs that last for weeks : TameBay : eBay news blog and forum

The PayPal bugs that last for weeks : TameBay : eBay news blog and forum — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:56:04 +0000

[...] in the week, TechCrunch reported on another long-running bug, whereby users trying to pay subscriptions (recurring payments) through [...]

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:48:24 +0000

The workaround is sending the country details via a dropdown box on your own site so you can include “&country=XX” on the end of the paypal URL, where XX is the 2 letter country code (US, DE, FR, ES, etc). Then when the customer goes to pay, the country you sent in will be the default country!

This tricks the system into treating transactions from other countries correctly. The list of codes are available here… http://www.pdnc...;message.id=398

By: Kyle

Kyle — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:11:38 +0000

I have given up on paypal now.

With 0 followup to the issues they had, and not willing to reverse charges on payments that I had to monkey around.

Seriously, this is the end of the line for them, and I highly suggest everyone think twice about using them in the future.

Zero Customer Service
Rude when they are having a problem.
The unwillingness to admit when they are wrong.

They just do not care one bit about you, and their staff is clueless.

By: Thomas

Thomas — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 13:10:42 +0000

I officially gave up on PayPal 2.5 weeks ago after the latest of a long history of bad service followed up with zero customer service. Ebay has the same problem (imagine that, both run by the same “leaders”) and lost my business with their constant fee hikes and policies designed to drive out small sellers.

I’m proudly Ebay/PayPal free and have no plans to go back. http://www.scio...ss-pile-of-sht/

By: Michael B.

Michael B. — Sat, 31 May 2008 16:11:18 +0000

Guys.. cmon now leave paypal alone… cough

By: Google Outed As Anonymous Ebay Critic

Google Outed As Anonymous Ebay Critic — Sat, 31 May 2008 07:49:50 +0000

[...] document is below. And in other news, PayPal was finally able to fix that drop down menu bug that plagued users for over ten days and was ignored until the press and blogs started to pay [...]

By: StatCounterJen

StatCounterJen — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:56:13 +0000

Hi folks,

Just want to let you know that Paypal have just acknowledged the “double billing” issue.

http://www.payp...;message.id=205

If YOU are a merchant whose customers have been affected by double billing, Paypal have confirmed that you can EITHER refund one of the two transactions by yourself OR contact their merchant support.

Hope this info is useful for some of you.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:54:20 +0000

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

By: Chuckee

Chuckee — Thu, 29 May 2008 11:34:18 +0000

This is a terrible problem that has forced me to leave PayPal.
You think this problem is bad for merchants in the USA? Try living outside the USA – let’s say I live in Germany – at the moment I would only be able to sell to other people *in Germany*!

I stayed with PayPal during the 3-4 weeks it took them to fix the problem with free trials (this was in April) – basically, no one could cancel any of their free trials. During this period there was no communication from PayPal as to what would happen to any of these free trials once they fixed the problem. As a result, many people emailed their ‘free trial signees’ after about 3 weeks suggesting that they pay manually. Unfortunately, PayPal eventually converted all of the free trials into paid memberships with no warning whatsoever to either buyer or the merchant.

By: John

John — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:13:17 +0000

No problems with PayPal here – not one…..

By: doug

doug — Thu, 29 May 2008 00:41:18 +0000

Alternatives to PayPal:

We were affected by the handling_cart variable not working in the PayPal shopping cart–the other major problem contained in the May 15 “upgrade” the also screwed subscriptions and int’l transactions. 14 days and counting with no fix–altho tech support did reply to our request for an update today by stating they couldn’t install a fix without 1st going thru testing and “quality control”–a process OBVIOUSLY skipped for the orig “upgrade” on May 15…

Went looking last nite–into the wee hrs–for a reasonable alternative to the PayPal shopping cart. Evaluated dozens of shopping cart links provided by our merchant account (Echo Inc); the closest I found to the PayPal cart is designcart.com, a relatively simple secure cart hosted on their secure server, implemented with html buttons like PayPal, and reasonably priced at $15/month ($165 annual). Not sure about subsciption capabilities, but they do have the equiv of the handling_cart variable in PayPal. Also, the bonus of your customers able to pay via Google Checkout or PayPal or numerous other gateways of your choice if you already have one, like we did for over-the-phone orders. We’re going for it.

Also, we got an email notice today from PayPal announcing “Live Site Maintenance” for Thursday, May 29 at 11 pm PST; no specifics about what’s included in the release–typical…

Just fyi…

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 28 May 2008 21:38:42 +0000

Is there a way to deal with possible problems with TechCrunch’s trackback system? Or at least to find out if I screwed something up?

From http://www.patt....net/blog/?p=15 :

“I simply don’t comprehend why companies are so resistant to dealing with problems like this”

By: Olivier Pons

Olivier Pons — Wed, 28 May 2008 11:33:22 +0000

Okay okay. You may be right : there must be a way to get back really quickly to an old version and then to check for the bug.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:16:53 +0000

There are a lot of current issue 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”.

By: Tony

Tony — Wed, 28 May 2008 00:25:27 +0000

This article prompted me to write about bugs and bug fixing in general – but for some reason the trackback isn’t showing up…

By: Mark

Mark — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:13:23 +0000

The video’s down.

3 days and counting, yo!

By: Miles Kilo

Miles Kilo — Tue, 27 May 2008 17:11:00 +0000

Only 10 days? There’s another bug in the PayPal shopping cart that’s been going on for 12 days — since the 15th — with no end in sight. This bug is reportedly costing both US and international merchants up to $15 per transaction, with no workaround in sight!

http://www.pdnc...ding&page=1

By: Steve Jagger

Steve Jagger — Tue, 27 May 2008 16:06:35 +0000

This is getting crazy. It would be really helpful to be able to get paid. Come on PayPal – get on it.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:51:35 +0000

Olivier Pons, don’t be such a god damn tool. Any company that has long deployment times also needs to have emergency rollout provisions. What if they made an update that brought down the ENTIRE Paypal payment system, for every type of payment, for ALL users. You’re telling me that it would be perfectly fine and dandy for it to be on day 12 now without a fix, and oh they just have lots of servers and it takes a while to change stuff, so hey what’s the big deal?

Give me a fucking break. They have to have a way to fix something immediately if it needs fixing. Either a rollback to the previous version, or a way to get new code out the door in less than 24 hours.

By: Tom Holder

Tom Holder — Tue, 27 May 2008 13:28:25 +0000

This isn’t the only problem, I’ve have had multiple problems with PayPal recently. The worst being the fact we couldn’t take card payments from non-registered users.

One of my favorites which clearly demonstrates how inept their development team is shows a simple usability error in their payments management:

http://ok-cool....-a-transaction/

It’s almost as if they have no change control system or bug tracking in place to deal with these issues. When you’re dealing with money and people’s livelihoods this is totally unacceptable.

By: Wes Mahler

Wes Mahler — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:03:19 +0000

@76,

It shouldn’t take 10 days to fix it, thats the point! It was working before, I’m sure they have older revisions, or something they could revert to.

Something this big to stop all incoming new international paying subscribers from US paypal businesses for TEN DAYS is a big deal, and regardless of how hard it is to fix it there is little communication on the paypal side, and action, and communication back again to see if anything is being done.

By: John

John — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:02:42 +0000

Maybe we should contact Mike directly to press for a resolution of this issue ?

Michael Oldenburg
moldenburg@paypal.com
408-967-5033

By: Olivier Pons

Olivier Pons — Tue, 27 May 2008 07:40:28 +0000

Stop saying PayPal do not really care about its users.
It seems nobody here can imagine the efforts it takes just to change one line of code.
The guy who wrote that “it probably took them longer to write the blog post noting the bug than it would have taken to simply fix it” just show he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
It takes 4 months for a big company (1500 employees) just to add an sftp transfer into the Accounting dept. Just the principle, nothing else.
So, tell me honestly :
- how long does it take to test the code on all the browsers, on all the concerned OS, on all the languages the bug appears ;
- how many computers does ebay use and where are they located ;
- how long does it take to update the code on all those computers ?
- once every server is fully updated, how long does it take to test everything and to be sure that everything work all around the world ?
- what if the corrected bugs introduces another one ? What is the whole procedure to get everything back to the original state ?

I’m pretty sure almost everybody around here doesn’t know anything about the questions, not to talk about the answers.

What I mean is that a guy wrote “it’s soooooooooooooo damn easy to change one single line of code I don’t understand why they’ve not done it in less than 10 days” and everybody thinks he’s right, everybody’s talking about burning shame but nobodys really knows what they are talking about.

And this guy is spreading a rumor that eBay is not good at his job.
Just think twice : who is not good at his job : the guy who writes an article about a tech-company whereas he’s not a good technician, or the company itself ?