The PayPal bugs that last for weeks
31/05/2008 at 17:03
With everything else that’s been going on recently, it’s been a good time to bury PayPal glitches. Not that PayPal glitch reports seem particularly time-sensitive these days, because the ones we’ve heard about have been going on for weeks.
I had an email from TameBay reader Antonio, regarding PayPal payment notification emails, which he is simply not receiving. I know this problem has been going on for a while because I’ve complained about it myself: the real problem is that it’s intermittent, so it can take longer to notice that it’s actually happening. Antonio says that PayPal support have told him that “our engineers are actively working to resolve this with the highest priority”, but in the meantime, anyone who works purely on PayPal emails really needs to use another way of checking what payments they’ve really received.
Earlier in the week, TechCrunch reported on another long-running bug, whereby users trying to pay subscriptions (recurring payments) through PayPal would not be able to do so if they were in a different country to the merchant collecting the payment. TechCrunch speculate that this was “a very simple thing to change, perhaps a single line of code”, but it still took nearly two weeks to be fixed. The PayPal Developer blog reports that as of yesterday, the problem is resolved, though some payments may have been collected twice.
Gill says
7:46 pm on 31/05/2008
Yes – I’m still experiencing the intermittently missing payment notification emails too.
Ed says
1:49 pm on 01/06/2008
If you have your own website you can set up IPN (Instant Payment Notification). I have mine setup to send me an email whenever a payment goes through I have found thios works even when the normal notifications don’t.
IPN has other advantages too, like making it possible to create and print your own customised invoices in response to each sale.
Ed.
Jamie Jimbob says
4:10 am on 02/06/2008
Me too. This is a problem that has frequently reared its head for years on end. Will they ever get it sorted? They manage to take money off you without a hitch but when it comes to providing the service they’re paid for it’s another matter altogether (exactly the same as eBay come to think of it!).
Kevin_T says
7:10 am on 02/06/2008
Bigpond is one of Australia’s larger Internet server providers, owned by our main telecommunications network. For about three weeks in April – May, users on that server could not access PayPal’s site. I don’t know who was at fault, but once Ebay becomes PayPal only this type of thing will cause major headaches for both buyers and sellers who use a server that can not access the PayPal infrastructure. I would think it will cause problems with DSR’s but may be wrong.
There have been numerous other glitches in Australia over the last few months (including taking funds from bank accounts when they were only authorised to take payments from credit cards), co-inciding with Ebay and PayPal imploring that we trust their security.
Kevin