Why Is Paypal Always Down These Days?
Written on August 21, 2008 – 11:00 am
Steven Carrol, Next Web WebTipr France
Being a web developer and system admin for my own network, I have more sympathy than most when it comes to problems with scaling and general system admin. But this is Paypal I’m talking about and being the ‘premier’ service provider of online payments it is simply unforgivable.
I’m actually generally very fond of Paypal, since my last rant about their ineptness they actually contacted me and followed up with some useful tips on resolving some idiosyncrasy’s with their system. As I had long since given up with their standard customer service (which is generally considered to be non existent) it was a welcome interjection of support.
They have even implemented at least one of my suggestions that I made which would IMO improve their system (glade to hear their listening) and it was a great improvement. Alas, as of the last 4 weeks (at least) paypal has been suffering with consistent rounds of intermittent downtime (in Europe only I’m told). I have emailed my contacts (some higher ups in France) who have explained they have been having some issues with ‘cookies’ and some localized issues that were thought to have been resolved.
Well I can assure you Paypal they have not been resolved. I have spent most of the day (trying) to test a shopping cart function for a new application and Paypal has been intermittently down for much of today (very annoying). Even more worryingly for the last month every time I have checked the site for one reason or another I have had issues ranging from some features not working to complete downtime.
But for companies trading using Paypal as their sole method of payment these ongoing troubles are tantamount to denial of service attacks. The effort companies go to actually get a customer to the checkout is huge and extremely costly, to have the checkout girl throw a wobble at the last minute and tell the customer to **** off could rightly be called a sackable offense!
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By Mark Harrison on Aug 21, 2008
I’m having the same problem here in the UK. Days and days without PayPal access. Really annoying if you buy something on eBay that requires instant payment or need to pay eBay seller fees! I load the PayPal screen, the browser slowly ID’s the security certificate, then I wait… and wait… and wait for the next page to load. It never loads. I tried both IE7 and FF3. PayPal vendors must be loosing multi-millions in sales each week - simply because their customers just can’t pay them. I’m looking around for a PayPal alternative, but can’t really find one. Suggestions are welcome.
[Reply]
By Steven Carroll on Aug 21, 2008
Mark, I’m finding that also many features are not functioning (such as account history links) etc. as well as resolution center has lost all details of the claim I had made against some scammer that took 75$ from my account on an recurring payment that is 1) not listed in recurring payments and was not sold as a recurring payment. Though trying to make a new claim the system says its already been disputed.
What really gets me (apart from all the obvious) is that the speed of the site when working seems to load dreadfully slowly (aggravating smoothness of sales) as well their new micro payments function. Currently you need to open a new account if you want that low fee (5%) on sales under 12 usd it’s the better option, rather than just setting these fees up as standard for everyone.
It just reeks of profit hauling for the sake of it.
The way they are going they could be taking out of the market right now by google if they opened it up outside of USA.
[Reply]
By Sean on Aug 21, 2008
Yeah, Paypal’s reliability has been shit this year. Up until 3 months ago, it was our sole payment method on Clicky, when all of a sudden we couldn’t accept international payments for 14 days, and we lost thousands of dollars. We wrote a blog post about it which got picked up by TechCrunch, reddit, etc, which generated over 25,000 page views: http://getclicky.com/blog/120/.....g-about-it
We have since implemented a direct credit card payment option. It’s quite a bit of work to get that integrated but our revenues immediately went up almost 30%. Part of this is because people had to sign up for a subscription on Paypal with our service, which required creating an account. Obviously, there were quite a few people who didn’t want to do that.
Now we accept both PP and CCs. About 3/4 of new payments use our credit card system. Paypal is nice because it’s so easy to integrate, which is hwy we stuck with it for so long. But having more than one payment processor is really nice so if one of them has a problem, people can just use the other. To anyone who has the resources to do so, I’d highly recommend it.
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By Paul on Aug 22, 2008
HOW COME PAYPAL DOESN’T OPEN UP TO PAY FOR EBAY ITEM, OR (2.) DOESN’T OPEN UP MY ACCOUNT INFORMATION TO ATTEMPT TO FINSISH CURRENT EBAY TRANSACTIONS FOR PAYMENT, ON TIME !
THEY MAKE YOU WAITE 6 MONTHS OF IINACTIVITY ON ACCOUNT, TO CLOSE ACCOUNT! EVEN WITH A ZERO BALENCE DUE.
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By Sebastian Moeys on Aug 23, 2008
Paypal is ridiculous. I figured I’d use it for some of my earnings from ad networks abroad. Ended up having my account blocked for weeks because the transfers weren’t linked to an eBay item, which apparently was enough to make me a Nigerian scammer in their eyes. After resolving the issue the exact same thing happenend again, effectively freezing my balance for a month.
Got back to using the old-fashioned wire transfer.
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