You already knew that, but I’m going to rant about this anyway.
I have a business account with paypal that I use for a business of mine. In general, things have been fine — until about a month ago, when I logged in and couldn’t access any of my account history. Nothing recent and nothing old. I had a customer who wanted to cancel a subscription, and I didn’t have access to it.
I emailed paypal and explained the problem. They answered my question by ignoring my email and saying I could access my account history by going to the “history” section — like I was an idiot who couldn’t find the right section.
I looked around on the web and saw I wasn’t the only one affected, and that Paypal had confirmed the problem. Finally my paypal service rep admitted and said it would be fixed soon. Yet it’s been weeks and I still can’t access my account history. Which means I’m really screwed when it comes to managing refunds or cancellations, or seeing anything about what’s going on with my account.
I also emailed Paypal and asked to cancel the customer’s subscription since I couldn’t, but they just ignored my question. So the customer had to do a dispute which was the only way I could give a refund — which is bad experience for the customer and not good for my reputation.
This is unacceptable. Paypal is owned by eBay, a huge company. Do they really not have the resources to fix a major bug like this that is affecting many businesses and customers?
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21 Comments
Maybe they’ve all been praying about it. God will fix the problem in His own time, and as it suits His divine plan. You can’t blame staff at Paypal or eBay for something that is far beyond their limited human capacity for reason.
Paypal’s ways are mysterious.
eBay sucks too. They have the whole system of disputes and complaints automatized so that a person never needs to deal with you. Their only purpose is to make as much money as possible. You, I’m afraid, don’t matter one bit.
Paypal, Papal ???
oh man…I could go on forever about the ineptitude and incompetance at ebay/PayPal. (I used to be a PowerSeller there) They have probably the worst customer service of any company known to man. Watch out if you ever get a “chargeback’. They freeze all your accounts, including money from other transactions, and rarely side with the seller.
Praypal?
Don’t you mean “PreyPal”?
You’ve just described my main hesitancy to use online-only financial services, such as PayPal and online-only retailers: if there’s no brick and mortar with real life human beings as sales representatives, how do you really know that you’ll ever be able to sort out a problem like this?
If you buy a lemon from Best Buy (even if online), and you have a hard time returning it, you can go into the store and make a scene. Because Best Buy cares about their image, they’ll placate the customer (even if the customer is technically wrong).
I love technology, and I love convenience, but sometimes there’s no substitute for a person …
I wholeheartedly agree. PayPal and eBay (now all part of the same corporation) were both really quite good about customer service way back when they were young upstarts. Now they both suck toilet water. I would advise any and all to avoid doing business with either of them. Everything I have read above so far is accurate. These problems are not new. The company comes first, not the customer. Contacting a real human is nearly impossible, and even if you do, getting them to reciprocate with any kind of real human-to-human contact is almost unheard of. They love to dole out useless pat answers and leave big problems unsolved and dangling in the wind for weeks and months at a time. I hope for the day when I will find a new online auction service and a new online money transfer service, companies where the word “monopoly” is considered evil and customer service is priority number one.
Good luck with getting your account unfrozen and things back to normal. You’re going to need it. PayPal loves to punish its members for no good reason. It’s worse than Scientology.
theres always Google….up and coming payment system for web, check it out Daniel.
Yeah I might switch — they didn’t use to have a subscription feature, but I think they do now. Unfortunately, that won’t help with all the people on paypal.
I had a similar problem with them a few months ago when I moved. I entered in my new address and set it to home, but couldn’t delete the old address because it had been confirmed with a credit card. So i try to delete the credit card from my account, and it just didn’t work. I would check the little box next to the credit card hit the delete button and the page would refresh with the credit card still there. I had to call them up and after the customer service lady told me to do what i had already been doing three times before she finally believed me that the credit card wasn’t going away. Then she told me well you might want to try this other menu instead, and after some navigating i was able to delete the credit card. I asked her why we didn’t do that in the first place, and how come the website has two different ways to delete a credit card with the most obvious one not working. Of course she had no idea why.
This was after i decided to quite my ebay buisness idea because of the exorbitant fees for sellers. Out of every dollar I made about 25 cents was going to ebay or paypal in fees, which if your trying to sell a bunch of small items is a waste of time.
I use PayPal exceedingly sparingly, but half the time is a problem. The latest was when I moved three years ago, I deleted my old address and inserted the new one. When I went to buy something last month, my old address was still an option! I checked my new address, but apparently, my old address is the only one visible to retailers, because that was where my item was headed.
I emailed the retailer and PayPal within the same ten minutes. The retailer responded within an hour and, after jumping through some hoops that were not the retailers fault, I received my package.
I’ve yet to hear from PayPal. After reading all of these posts, why am I surprised…
The worst thing is that this retailer uses PayPal as its preferred method. I really want to order from this place again as their product (and customer service) are high quality. Dang it.
Pay Pal is horrible. I went through a whole headache with them some years back when they wanted personal information for me to prove I was really me. Have you seen the site paypalsucks.com?
I’ve had the same experience with both and more recently (much to my dismay) with my bank. They completely ignore the substance of the question. I laid into my bank about it, not that it did any good (other than just venting).
They must use an automated system that answers via keywords only – no real customer service people.
Shill Bidding on eBay: a Case Study
For eBay “watchers”, a detailed case study of the crime of “shill” bidding and the abuse of eBay’s proxy bidding system—all exacerbated by eBay’s introduction of “hidden bidders”—plus a detailed general criticism of eBay’s “clunky” auction platform, and policies, at
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=24033
A synopsis thereof:
very little of the auction system security, that eBay claims to offer buyers, exists in fact;
contrary to their claims, it can be demonstrated that eBay has no “proactive” nor “sophisticated” system in place for the detection of undisclosed vendor (“shill”) bidding, and indeed eBay appears to do nothing about such criminal activity except as a reaction to users’ reports of suspicious bidding activity;
eBay appears to have no effective matter-of-course verification of users: unscrupulous users can apparently have as many user IDs as they may have email addresses;
many of eBay’s “rules”, concerning the retraction of bids, cancellation of auctions, etc, are nominal only and are no bar to the machinations of the unscrupulous seller;
as a result, eBay’s “proxy” bidding system is so open to abuse by such unscrupulous sellers that to use it, as eBay intends it to be used, can be an invitation to pay your maximum;
by the lack of any effectual system to proactively detect shill bidding, eBay has ever effectively, and knowingly, “aided and abetted” unscrupulous shill-bidding sellers to defraud naïve buyers;
the masking of bidding IDs with non-unique, absolutely anonymous aliases serves no purpose other than to obscure all but the most blatant of shill bidding, and defeats any attempt at comprehensive analysis of individual bidding patterns to expose such activity;
the quarterly changing of even these non-unique, absolutely anonymous, bidding aliases serves absolutely no other purpose than to stop even experienced eBay users from attempting to manually track suspicious bidding activity over time;
the anonymous, individual bidder Bid History Details pages, supposedly supplied to offset the absolute masking of bidding IDs, although better than nothing, usually present an ambiguous view and, in such circumstances, are of dubious value;
anyone naïve enough to “nibble” bid on a seller-elected “private” auction (ie, “User ID kept private”), on the balance of probability, is going to be defrauded;
when suspected fraud is reported, and is found by eBay to be proved to their satisfaction, eBay will conceal that fact from the victim of the fraud; this then is the concealing of a crime after the fact, surely, a crime in itself;
eBay will never acknowledge to a victim that a fraud has been perpetrated, nor indeed will eBay acknowledge that such fraud is even a problem on eBay auctions; eBay therefore sees no reason to provide any mechanism to aid in the recovery of any monies so defrauded;
if eBay did have any proactive and truly sophisticated system in place for the detection and control of shill bidding, we would not now be having this debate; and
for those buyers (and honest sellers) who embrace eBay believing that eBay acts as an “honest broker” between buyer and seller, I can only say that you may as well believe that there are fairies at the bottom of your garden too; and
the ugliest aspect of this matter is that we would quite rightly be upset if our local auctioneer, from whom we were buying, was found to be facilitating and concealing such criminal activity—and here is eBay, knowingly, doing this to the whole world!
I’ve never had a problem with PayPal before, but hearing about all your troubles (both Daniel and those in the comments), I am a little concerned. I was thinking about possibly starting a small online business selling handmade (made by me) jewelry and possibly some woodworking items of my brother’s in the near future. It’s nothing that I intend to make a great deal of money off of, but I had been planning to use PayPal, since most online vendors use it, and I hadn’t heard of any issues before. Now I wonder if I shouldn’t.
I’ve never had a problem with it. I find it easy to use and have never had any of the issues you all mention here. [raps on temple with knuckles]. Mind you, I use it sparingly as I don’t have a business attached to it, but just the same, it works fine for me.
To be fair, I manage quite a number of transactions for my boss’s website where most of the payments are made through paypal, and so far we’ve never had a problem.
But that may be entirely due to luck.
I meant $15 average sale.
And for all you eBay “buyers” who are still trying to find a bargain on eBay and are agile enough to avoid all the shill-bidding professional sellers, eBay recently touted two Diamond PowerSellers as major success stories of selling on eBay. Both are habitual shill bidders. The details at:
http://www.auctionbytes.com/forum/phpBB/viewtopic.php?p=6502763