Back in October we mentioned that buyers were intermittantly unable to pay for eBay purchases with PayPal. I was well aware of this as a PowerSeller friend was unable to pay for a product he’d bought from me but I thought the problem was done and dusted.
Today I received a message on an Unpaid Item Dispute which reads “Sorry about this, I click on the paynow button at the time, but the paypal webpage poped up said the payment details had already expired, and it’s because you cancelled payment method somehow. As a result, I paid and bought another one.”
Of course I hadn’t cancelled any payments through PayPal, it was an issue caused by a PayPal glitch. The result is I’ve lost an order, I have a buyer who could potentially leave negative feedback who is upset that after being unable to pay I’ve opened an unpaid item dispute, and currently I’m out of pocket for the eBay fees.
PayPal is a brilliant payment method when it works, but when a trusted payment method fails buyers naturally lose faith in it. It’s really not a great buying experience. 🙁
4 Responses
Paypal is causing me so many problems at the moment, not just the ‘expired’ bit, but incorrect addresses and telling the customer my details have changed. The eBay-Paypal interface causes the most trouble, but I also have problems in the Paypal Virtual Terminal with Solo and Maestro cards (even though they test fine), and on my website, I get more carts abandoned at payment time using Paypal, even though Nochex is more complicated for the buyer. The only grief Nochex ever causes me is when a buyer’s country isn’t accepted by Nochex – and usually a quick phone call gets the country added to the list.
We use Paypal Pro on our website for Paypal and Card payments.
Its great but occasionally falls over for no reason. So my customers repeatedly get the error their card is invalid.
The API and SOAP calls are fine, actually Paypal reports the card as not valid in the debug. TOSH!
Not true. their card is valid. In fact they usually call us and report it (its happened three times now since May).
I then use virtual terminal at paypal to make the payment and thru it goes.
Or i fall back on our PDQ. But Chris yep you are very right it can cost you a customer really easily! If they cannot be bothered to call, then thats that.
And of course they can neg you. But at least they are not paid so you could neg them back as they havent had autom feedback (yet!) 😛
I don’t do automatic feedback 😯 I don’t trust eBay that much 😉
I’d hesitate to neg them regardless though, it’s one of the very very few times I’m highly sympathetic to a buyer (Unless they’ve been reading TameBay and just realised it was the perfect excuse!!)
ya know im teasing about negging chris, i only neg where its deserved 🙂
and im still ranting about auto feedback on payment, its annoyed me that has
btw your pen, and biddies, is in the post 2nd class today 🙂