Sometime around May 16 a bug appeared in PayPal’s subscription payments page that stops people from paying if they live in a different country than the site collecting the money. The original complaint and discussion about it are here. More discussion here.
We’ve been hearing about it for a few days now, but bugs generally aren’t big news and we don’t cover them except in unusual circumstances.
Here’s what makes this different - it’s been going on for nearly ten days now, and the bug appears to be nothing more than a small issue with a drop down menu (see video above). A couple of days ago PayPal took the time to note the bug, but still no fix. People are starting to get really angry about it.
It appears that they simply aren’t storing the value of the country when a user changes it, a very simple thing to change, perhaps a single line of code. In fact, it probably took them longer to write the blog post noting the bug than it would have taken to simply fix it. The most likely explanation for the ridiculous amount of time it has taken to fix it: it’s probably stuck in a bug queue, and has to wait its turn. Meanwhile, PayPal merchants are losing money.
One merchant comment sort of says it all:
It’s staggering that PayPal has not fixed this most basic payment issue immediately. I contacted support when I received the first customer complaint about five days ago and PayPal support already knew about the error but could not provide an estimated time to fix it. Clearly PayPal cannot be relied upon to provide a stable payments system.
Same deal on their seller reputation numbers. No recalculation for months now. Emails to them on it just say they are aware of the bug. How hard is a count on transactions?
Don’t get me started on UPS integration either. Another bug for months there. Paypal is hurting. Must be losing people to Google Checkout…
Michael, this is another monopoly that needs to be called on. In this case, a lot of us had hopes on Google Checkout but doesn’t seem like they’ve made much inroad. Ebay blocking its use from auctions obviously didn’t help.
This is the least of their problems, some subscriptions have a habit of randomly disappearing from the system. It’s been several months and still not fixed either.
What is even more bizarre was a few months ago - when they suddenly shut down all PayPal accounts and forced everyone to go through a manual re verification that took days.
There was no warning ahead of time that this was happening, so many small online businesses were left in a void that took days to fix
Can anyone point to some Paypal alternatives? I’m having some problems with their system.
PayPal do not really care about its users. I tired contacting them once about an account for my travel company business and they would not provide detailed information about the deposit that they need to hold before making payment to our bank account.
When you sale airline ticket the amounts are large so I would not want them to hold our money for 30 days or something before we get paid.
My company has a direct merchants account with our bank and a payment gateway that deposits the money in the account the same day! We have 15 year relationship with the bank, so we get our money the next day.
The problem is we are not USA so for some USA credit card holders maybe a problem to pay with our payment gateway because of their bank’s limitation for using a credit card online to pay outside of USA. This happens only rarely and we have an alternative way for collecting payment.
So I figured why not set up PayPal for such cases being that the costs of settling the transaction is about the same, 3%.
But if PayPal cannot in a proper business matter disclose their deposit policy, then a business cannot engage with them.
PayPal is set up for small merchants and for personal businesses that cannot set up a merchant account dirrectly with their bank, because of a trust issue.
A merchant holds final laibility for transaction in the case of fraud.
PayPal knows all that and is being abusive to its customers.
Use as IS!
Yes! Since a few days ago, our users complained to us that they were unable to choose the recurring option to upgrade their Zorpia.com membership. We sent emails to their support and got no replies. So we decided to call them up. The answer we got were just as what was mentioned above. They did not even know when they could fix it! We had to take the recurring payment feature off until they have it fixed
Submit your complaints on: http://www.paypalsucks.com
We hate paypal from the bottom of our heart. Some of my friends want to see them bankrupt in their life soon.
Why does Paypal do like that….Higher the Brand Lowering the value and reputation.
In addition to PayPal we’re also using AlertPay.com to handle subscription payments on cushycms.com
Seems quite good.
Hopefully this post will get them to fix it.
Steve
This is complete bullsh*t and I have been dealing with it ever since. I run a business in Canada, and use paypal as a backup CC processing system when my terminal goes down.
I could not believe how many problems we have been having this week from their lack of “polishing”.
I have called them several times, left many emails, and they have hung up on me more than once. It has left me feeling completely exhausted, unimpressed and generally pissed off I ever gave them a dime of my business transactions. I am currently in the processing of removing all paypal integration from every aspect of my business.
Very very very bad mistake, I hope they realize what they have done, and you cannot leave your users high and dry in situations like this. It has not only affected our bottom line, but our reputation as well.
For a company with such penetration, this is a rather curious way to treat a simple bug which is obviously upsetting merchants and affecting business. Bug queue or not, how about some prioritization?
I used to work at PayPal back in the day. It was full of smart engineers then. The problem is they all left for greener pastures long ago. What remains is an embarrassingly broken development cycle where nothing ever gets done. At eBay what gets you promoted is _who_ you know. At PayPal it used to be _what_ you know.
Paypal is a Giant when it comes to online transaction, demographically speaking it is considered to be one of the most secure way of making online transactions.
And over 10 days in resolution of such a small bug … really gives a careless picture of the company.
However, as I have visited there website too and am not able to find so before hearing there side of the story I think it wouldn’t be wiser to jump on to some conclusion.
Mark
Editor
http://www.212articles.com
i personnaly prefer 2CheckOut.com (2CO)
anyone know about BLOGGER / BLOGSPOT.COM’s FTP publishing problem? This has been going for almost 2 weeks and there are HUNDREDS of posts in Google Groups, the only way to post the problem (no direct email to blogger team). No one has been able to publish via FTP, their blog posts, and some have had videos gone missing. http://groups.google.com/group.....rch+Groups
Mark: How exactly does one measure security in terms of demographics?
That said, if this were Twitter or Facebook, TechCrunch would have written this story the day the first complaint appeared.
Michael, thank you for writing about this. It takes a site with as much influence as yours to get a big company’s attention.
shen heng, go complain to Matt Cutts on his blog. Go complain to Adam Lasnik on his blog and on Friend Feed.
Go to Get Satisfaction and start a complaint post!
The more you Bitch the faster they fix a problem!
I believe the problem has been going on longer than since May 16th. Back in April (the 10th to be exact), I was trying to purchase tickets to the Mashable party in San Francisco. It would not allow me to purchase from Germany with a German credit card or even my American one. I had to put in an American address and use an American credit card before being able to purchase the tickets. I also had the same problem before that when trying to set up an account to pay for itunes using paypal. That didn’t work either. That was in March. I get lots of emails from paypal, but I am never sure, if they are really from paypal, so I delete them. I think they have to deal with their security issues as well as this issue of not allowing payment from anywhere. Until then, I’ll still delete their emails and I won’t use their service, which is a pain because, unfortunately, too many sites use them to accept payment.
This is really bad press for Paypal. Thanks for helping us out, Mike.
Advice to one and all
If you have a bug with paypal, don’t use there contact us method, it will never get dealt with, instead write a blog post about them then they WILL contact you to patch things up.
BTW Paypal was down over the weekend too a lot, Most of the time running really slowly.
Lastly this issue with the country selector, it needs to be placed on every countries landing page! so if you have language set to France you can change it, currently it is only for US.
I would point you in the direction of this article:
http://haacked.com/archive/200.....hange.aspx
Unless you have an underlying knowledge of the Paypal codebase you shouldn’t speculate on length, time and consequences of fixing a bug.
Ebay/PayPal doesn’t care about its customers. PayPal at the moment is so shoddy with a ton of bugs yet nothing is really being done - no communication and no support!
I hate using Ebay or PayPal because they treat customers like dirt - but there are no alternatives.
well,paypal is often used in China
eBay+Paypal is the new Microsoft. Only worse.
What if Mozilla used all that money in the bank to start a rival service? They already dethroned one giant with it’s head cleanly up it’s ass, maybe they should now take on another.
In the meantime “Go Amazon FPS!”
Their “IPN” feature was broken for 3 days recently too. This was a MAJOR bug and screwed over many, many businesses. It basically meant that when customers paid, the automatic notification from PayPal to the business didn’t work. Payments worked ok for the customer, but the business was not told that a transaction has happened. So all transactions had to be processed manually for 3 days!!
Can you imagine the impact on a business selling on-demand instant access (such as mine)??!! Crippling, basically.
Here’s a link to one of many, many PayPal developer forum posts on the subject….
http://www.pdncommunity.com/pd.....amp;page=1
Truly shocking that it took 3 days to fix.
This is ridiculous. Just yesterday, the day that I get the most subscription payments in a month, none of them registered on my software as it was supposed too so I had to manually enter it. I read a report about the IPN being broken well over a week ago.
The PayPal my account site (UK atleast) is not great either. I can no longer view which subscription a payment has come for as they completely removed the link. To do an advanced search I have to click like 3/4 things to get there when it should be easily accessible from every page.
There are a whole bunch of other issues I haven’t even mentioned.
I still think with this bug paypal is the best online transaction service created. There is nothing better, but Google Checkout is the best alternative.
It seems odd that anyone would be surprised by this type of inaction by PayPal. They have been going downhill for a long time. It really is a shame that Google Checkout has been blocked from eBay.
It really is tough to see that its till the same case with paypal, i don’t know what is the problem with these guys. A major part of the online transactions today happen through paypal and if somehow paypal were to go down , i would mean really bad time for most of the e-commerce industry.
Never has a company made my blood boil more than PayPal. It is as if they have made it into an art form of pissing off their users and showing complete disregard for it. I’ve heard it is even worse for developers trying to work with them. They clearly don’t care about their customers.
Anyway we’re going to take bets on how long this is going to take them to resolve:
http://www.hubdub.com/m7966/Ho.....n_Menu_Bug
Current forecast is that it still won’t be fixed by Thursday.
I still think with this bug paypal is the best online transaction service created. There is nothing better, but Google Checkout is the best alternative.
PayPal is fine but their bug fixing is total crap. I reported a bug early last year in the ability to send invoices by email. At the moment you can only request payment in about 4 currencies (US $, Euro, Yen, Canadian $ (I think)). They told me they were working on a drop down so a user could choose their own currency. That was almost 18 months ago and who knows how long it was a problem before I noticed it. However they did send me a manual work around that you have to do every time you send an email invoice. It was the same solution they sent me 18 months ago.
If they can spend time creating a solution why can’t they implement it???
even with this bug paypal is still the widely used online transaction service on the net
For the past wo days, we haven’t received any IPNs for recurring payments, only for new subscriptions. Now we have to process them all manually.
I wonder if PayPal ever tests its updates. This is just riduculous…
Paypal sucks. Every customer service rep I ever spoke to there was a 20 something pompous asshole and/or bitch.
The reps literally don’t care who’s business they turn away…EVERYONE is suspect to FRAUD, and they treat everyone as such. They explained how all these checks and balances were in place to prevent fraud. It took over 2 hours to process my clients credit card, the whole time he is freaking out asking me what’s up and PayPal is telling me the guy might be a fraud….so stupid.
Then you have to get your clients to sign up for paypal the 2nd time they buy from you. Fun to explain to clients.
Ya, I hate PayPal too.
I switched to Google Checkout….what a breathe of fresh air.
Paypal sucks. Every customer service rep I ever spoke to there was a 20 something pompous asshole and/or bitch.
The reps literally don’t care who’s business they turn away…EVERYONE is suspect to FRAUD, and they treat everyone as such. They explained how all these checks and balances were in place to prevent fraud. It took over 2 hours to process my clients credit card, the whole time he is freaking out asking me what’s up and PayPal is telling me the guy might be a fraud….so stupid.
Then you have to get your clients to sign up for paypal the 2nd time they buy from you. Fun to explain to clients.
Ya, I hate PayPal too.
I switched to Google Checkout….what a breathe of fresh air.
@38 Jim, Google Checkout _may be_ a breathe but certainly limited one — it is all about being merchant either in US or UK, otherwise you _are_ excluded. To me they are myth, non-existent
@A.T.
Give Google some time… they seem to be a globally forcused company.
Hmmm. Seems like there are a bunch of recent bugs with PayPal. A few weeks ago I noticed something odd in the payment notifications, that the note was no longer included with the email notification. Very inconvenient for me since customers for my specialty translation business include the short text for translation in the note. I had to keep contacting them for the text since the note had disappeared. I didn’t think too much of it. But now it seems like a rash of problems at PayPal may have come up recently.
I wonder why people prefer to bitch while they could just google out “paypal alternative” and read and… Oh, yeah - bitching is easier
And I’m no better myself - easy bitch too 
AMAZING that nobody from PayPal has responded!
Hey PayPal: Respond in the forums!!!!!!!!!!!
Wow, these developers are on another planet.
How can you note such a high priority bug without taking the time to fix it immediately?
Seems they think this is just another bug, which can wait until they role out the next release to be fixed.
The lack of urgency here is stunning.
What a disconnect.
By the way, the title of this article understates the issue a bit.
How about something more appropriately sensational, such as “PayPal Not Processing Transactions, Ten Days And Counting”
That would have grabbed my attention faster.
I’ve tried working on PayPal support in mojoPortal several times but its difficult to finish the work because the PayPal developer sandbox is constantly having timeout errors and other problems that make it very difficult to test adequately. Its really a shame, they have a good service when it works and a strong brand name but their reputation is spiraling downhill fast. One gets the sense that no-one is really manning the ship.
In contrast, the google checkout sandbox works very reliably and it gives one a sense of confidence in the production environment whereas the PayPal sandbox makes one worry whether one will have similar problems on the production PayPal environment.
what does this has to do with tech?
or for that matter crunch?
PayPal still works seamlessly for retail type transactions, but they are certainly experiencing some problems for what seems to be about the last 6 months. No other service has the penetration to be a serious replacement just yet.
I think that now it’s working…they must have fixed it!
I am also veryt upset with PayPal. After experiencing a problem using PayPal as the payment method to register for an iTunes account, I called PayPal customer support. The (lame) customer support person first told me to use a payment method accepted in the USA. Now, I have lived most of my 42 years in the USA, where I currently reside. I have been using a USA based credit card with my PayPal account since I registerd for an account when PayPal first laucnhed, but this guy insists the problem is related to my credit card.
When he finally realizes that I am not accepting his first attempt to ditch me, he tells me to clear my browser cache. I oblige to no avail, but I knew that wouldn’t fix the problem. I am really surpriused he didn’t ask me to also reboot my laptop as that seems to be the case for most other customer support sites. Next, he insisted that I need to use a different browser; as if IE 7.0 is not a supported browser.
Anyway, this went on and on, until finally we both gave up. He informed me that he would have the tech team look into the issue, and I would receive a follow-up email within 3 business days. Wanna guess whether I received the follow-up email? Perhaps PayPal has not heard about the Net Promoter Score. http://www.netpromoter.com/