The guys at Shoply have developed a new app, SlowPal, to help PayPal users manage their transactions. It was first spotted by Tamebay reader Jimbo a few weeks back but it’s now ready for use. Slowpal is a simple web app which imports your transaction data and makes it super quick and easy to search, browse and filter. Slowpal uses official Paypal API’s to access your data and has read-only permissions with your Paypal account.
Slowpal was built initially as an internal tool, Liad of Shoply told me, to make it quicker and easier for Shoply to manage their own transactions. It turned out so good that they decided to make it public so others can benefit from the time savings it offers.
Through managing the Shoply marketplace they’ve had to deal with tens of thousands of transactions running through Paypal. Searching, browsing, filtering transaction reports on PayPal aren’t the easiest processes to manage and often take some time to generate. SlowPal speeds everything up as well as adding real insights and business intelligence to help you grow your business.
SlowPal is PayPal reports on steroids, and yes it’s now all SSL and ready to use
15 Responses
Slowpal? It is a pretty bad name, no? Or am I missing something?
No it isn’t. As I stated before when it was first posted on TameBay it is not using SSL for log in. The only way to log in using SSL is to provide them false credentials first and then it will direct you to a secure login page that uses SSL. It is currently impossible to sign in securely to the site since going to https://slowpal.com redirects to https://slowpal.com. They save a few CPU cycles and you send your password in the clear.
To make matters a bit worse their cookies aren’t secure. This means that I could log in through their one SSL log in page but the moment I hit the insecure front page I’m at risk of having my session hijacked. Anyone with a packet sniffer on the network suddenly has access to my cookie which is not encrypted and can duplicate it. Then the hacker now has read-only access to my PayPal account. And very quick access at that.
And then to do exactly to SlowPal what they do to PayPal someone needs to create a clone site. Call it SecureSlowPal. Copy their logo (violating any possible trademark they have on SlowPal) but add the word “Secure” to the front. The site would use proper security. Then create a Facebook page explaining how it is secure as opposed to the original SlowPal and post links to sites where users like me complain they lack SSL for log in. Finally it would use a cartoon lock for all the loading screens.
What is shocking though is, now that I know this is developed by Shoply, I went to Shoply and see they have the same issue except SSL appears to be completely nonexistent for the entire domain. You can’t sign up or log in securely on that site no matter what you try.
These guys clearly don’t care much about security and I’d avoid using their products until they get their act together. By the way eBay requires its Open eBay developers to follow these security procedures so I don’t know why PayPal would let this pass assuming they’ve actually gone through the equivalent of eBay’s App check process. I have a hunch they haven’t. Then there is the whole very obvious trademark issue which is likely to prevent that from ever happening.
My reaction also regarding the name.
Why not call it FastPal?
It is inevitable that somebody will now develop a service with this name so SlowPal should register it quick!
So it is. A google search revealed nothing so the domain holders meta words are rubbish. It is only a holding domain though with plenty of alternative .’s available. Why is .com so important?
And on the face of it there is still nothing to stop the trademark FastPal being registered.
Why can’t PayPal sort it out so that reports run a bit better. Surely (fast) reports should be an integral part of the service they offer?
whats the point in finding a transaction when you can do bugger all with it[refund] unless you go back to paypal
and if you use ebays blackthorne software the paypal transaction id with a clickable link is available direct from the sales info