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PayPal Apparently Costs Merchants Thousands of Dollars By Not Communicating
Last week I explained why startups should have status notifications for downtime, maintenance and any other customer communications. I assumed large companies already knew this but apparently not. The real question is: when should a company post a notice of an issue that they know about? My initial thought is immediately but clearly there are times when it makes sense not to post immediately — for example, a security hole.
A developer posted an issue with accepting payments on the PayPal message board on May 16, 2008. The issue centers around the ability to accept a payment when they country of the buyer and seller don’t match. When you select another country, a never-ending loop begins. It took PayPal 7 days to even acknowledge the issue.
PayPal has posted a message on their status page with a basic explanation. Apparently when they rolled out their last site update on May 15, 2008, the issue listed above arose. The issue still has not been resolved and no further status has been provided by PayPal.
Clicky CEO Sean Hammons has a good detailed explanation of the issue. Hammons notes that the issue, "has already cost us many many thousands of dollars in lost revenue." He goes on to say:
How many millions of dollars has this bug cost all of Paypal’s customers? I would be so ashamed of myself if I was the one responsible for this bug, that I would quit immediately and go apply for a job flipping burgers, because that would be more my skill level. It’s absolutely unbelievable for a company of this size, that so many internet businesses rely on to collect money from their customers, has had a problem of this magnitude for 10 days and counting. Un. Flipping. Believable.
The real question here (besides the apparent lack of ability to fix a basic HTML form) is why did it take PayPal a week just to document the issue?
Last year I was not able to claim payments received via PayPal and the overall outage became a huge story in the PayPal developer community.
This is always like this with pp - either they are banning someone, or it does not work right - I accept payments from around the world and have such trouble getting help from pp.
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. This market really needs Google Checkout or someone to really put some pressure on them.
Anyway we’re going to take bets on how long this is going to take them to resolve:
http://www.hubdub.com/m7966/How_Long_Will_It_Take_PayPal_To_Fix_The_Drop_Down_Menu_Bug
Current forecast is that they are 80% likely to have it fixed by Friday.
We use the PayPal API on our stores and never have had a problem with non US orders. PayPal does post outage messages, they are visible when logged in to your PayPal account. Generally speaking PayPal has been more reliable than our regular credit card payment gateway and credit card processor.
I’ve been a PayPal business merchant since 2001.
Just my .02 on this subject.
Sean Hammons sounds like a douche. He clearly lives on another planet where no one makes mistakes. How about blaming QA for not catching this?
@Dave - No where in Sean’s blog post does he say he has a problem with people making mistakes. What he is questioning is why it is taking over 10 days to fix a simple mistake. He is also questioning why PayPal has not taken a proactive step to fix this issue and taken more measures to inform their customers of the issue. I completely respect his frustration and if I used PayPal as my primary payment processor I too would be highly frustrated at how something as simple to fix as a drop-down box and storing a variable in session takes over 10 days to fix, especially when the problem could be classified as a partial outage of the entire PayPal platform.
Dave, whatever - everyone makes mistakes and I know that, I do it all the time myself. If the bug had cropped up, but Paypal recognized it and fixed within 1 or 2 days, that would be ok. Still crappy because we’re processing a lot of money everyday through PP, but at least it would be obvious they cared about it and fixed it.
Now it’s day 11, and it’s still not fixed. That’s just unacceptable, *especially* considering how simple the bug is. That’s why I’m so pissed.
I am not surprised by this problem. Ebay and Paypal have set up an organisation without any customer attention. Six monthes ago Ebay closed during one month my account due to an internal problem of communication between Ebay and Paypal. They do not care about the problems the can create for their customers, and the only answers you can get are copies of FAQ.
I hope that this alert and your communication will move these companies towards more customer care.
Dave is clearly a programmer. No one else would be so quick to blame QA.
I am with Dave, there is no way this should got past regression testing.
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