PayPal glitch undercharges on 3rd party checkouts
15/11/2008 at 18:16
There is a glitch with PayPal which is undercharging for carriage on 3rd party checkouts. The glitch appears to be affecting sales where the buyer selects optional insurance on top of the normal postage cost. PayPal appear to be changing the total and not charging for the insurance the buyer has selected.
PayPal and eBay have identified the problem which first exhibited itself at around 11am on Thursday and are working on a fix. They aim to get a solution completed and rolled out as soon as possible and will continue working on it over the weekend.
Buyers who don’t select optional insurance are not being affected with postage correctly charged and the glitch only appears to affect those using 3rd party checkout solutions. Sadly many of those using 3rd party checkout solutions such as ChannelAdvisor are amongst the biggest sellers on eBay who may have hundreds if not thousands of incorrectly charged transactions.
Marcel Bouffard says
7:48 pm on 15/11/2008
The problem is worst than you describe!!!
All of our customers who bought more than 1 item and paid with PayPal were charged the wrong amount. Basically PayPal charges for each item individually, even though our Channel Advisor shipping is configured with flat fee based on order total weight.
This problem seems to have started yesterday (Nov 14th).
We now have angry customers, and are racing to refund them for overcharged shipping, hopefully before they give us bad DSR ratings.
Chris Dawson says
11:04 pm on 15/11/2008
eBay have now put out an announcement confirming the problem and that they aim to fix it tonight
Andy says
11:13 pm on 15/11/2008
The lesson for everyone here is don’t use 3rd party checkout systems.
All I’ve encountered are long and drawn out and only make sure I’d never shop with that seller again.
Chris Allen says
1:36 am on 16/11/2008
We have been dealing with this issue and if you enable PayPal express and the 3P checkout with ChannelAdvisor works correctly. The only drawback is that the eBay coupons will not work with PPEC turned on, so you need to see which is more important. This has been a nightmare. Also, it started at aroun 7:30AM PST Friday the 14th because that is when we got our first incorrect payment from PayPal.
Chris
Barry Mann says
5:51 pm on 16/11/2008
Started 11pm on the 13th.
Barry Mann says
5:57 pm on 16/11/2008
Ive got 600 orders affected. I wouldnt say dont use 3rd party checkouts are a result, thats just throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There have been eBay checkout problems in the past that didnt affect us……
Marcel Bouffard says
1:00 am on 17/11/2008
Looks like the bug still isn’t fixed. Just got an order from an international customer, bought 2 items on eBay. Channel Advisor combined invoice properly, charges $11.95 shipping. PayPal charged $23.90.
We are a small company who process about 1000 orders per month, I can only imagine how painful this issue must be for large businesses!
Jamie says
11:04 am on 19/11/2008
the problem seems to have been when ebay showed a different combined amount to the checkout. for example when someone selected a different postage method.
it seems that paypal stopped taking the total from checkout and started taking it from ebay instead. so when the customer then tried to pay more (from the checkout), it not only let them only pay the ebay amount, but also flagged it as possible fraud!
thankfully we weren’t busy over the weekend, so only had a few instances of this. i dread to think what it would have been like had we been as busy as we were last year!