PayPal Archive

We already know that Yahoo had some issues on Cyber Monday. One of the best deals yesterday was Paypal offering 20% back on some merchants (up to $50 back). One of which was NewEgg. Newegg has become the darling of the tech gadget scene in the last year or so. I’ve enjoyed purchasing from them even though it’s always been a big clunky.

They have huge street cred and are very popular mainly because the prices are good and shipping is fast. When I learned of the deal, I was excited as I wanted to upgrade my 15" black and white CRT for a 24" souped up Samsung LCD.

Turns out the deal has brought on some very rotten eggs. It seems that either Paypal or Newegg (or both) screwed up big time. There was a lot of confusion – on which products the deal covered and for how long. Newegg staff made the situation worse by first claiming it was offered only on select items, then changing their tune to say it was available on any product. Newegg is blaming Paypal for the issue.

Other posts on the topic:

• Fatwallet
• Newegg Forums – 139 posts already

Whatever the cause, this will certainly cause a tremendous amount of grief for Newegg’s customers and many cancelled sales.  It looks like Paypal is taking the storm while Newegg just has a little egg on their face. Let’s see how Paypal handles the issue – we already know how poor Paypal’s customer service is. I am disappointed as it would have been nice to view multiple blogs at once. :)

Yesterday I logged into PayPal and attempted to "accept" a payment. When I click accept, it goes to a page that has an html title of "page not found" and a link to "try again". I waited 24 hours and then contacted support. Moments ago I received the following response:

Thank you for contacting PayPal.

Hello my name is Reimer, I am sorry to hear about the situation regarding accepting an 'unclaimed' payment, and understand your frustration and concern over this issue.  I am happy to assist you with your questions.

Unfortunately, that error is a known issue that is already being worked on by our technical personnel and we are still waiting for any updates about the timeframe for the fix. At the moment the suggested work around is to deny the payment and have it re-sent to the other email address in your PayPal account.

We appreciate your patience and understanding regarding this matter, and wish you continued success on PayPal.

Sincerely,
Reimer
PayPal Community Support, PayPal, an eBay Company

Now I read a lengthy comment stream on TechCrunch about an issue receiving PayPal subscription payments. There are also threads on PayPal along with a developer blog entry about the issue. Amie commented (my emphasis):

Yup, we’ve been seriously impacted. At current time, we have over 2600 subscribers via PayPal with the bulk of our subscriptions automatically renewing at the beginning of the month, which has just passed, and we budget accordingly. 95% of our income for our business comes in via PayPal subscriptions. Right now, we can’t pay our employees and pretty soon bills are going to start bouncing. In short, we’re screwed.

First, WHY is there no message on the PayPal home page about the issue? How many people know to go to the developer section to find out what's going on? I doubt many. Also, with all of the issues around another eBay company, Skype, last month, why is eBay allowing another major outage to be so poorly handled? Wouldn't it make sense to do a quick account scan and email anyone who has sent or received a subscription payment in the last 60 days? Is it so hard to communicate with your customers?

It's easy for us to say we will move to another IM/Phone client or another micropayments service, but who else is there? eBay knows they are the only major player in the markets they serve. Oh well, guess my payment will be there soon, it's not enough for me to get crazy over (yet), but I totally understand Amie's and the other's concerns.