PayPal coders go from sloppy to sleepy

It seems that PayPal (owned by eBay) is aiming to breed contempt among its merchants, previously PayPal’s ‘errors’ have cost merchants their time and indirectly their money due to a loss of customers created by a lack of faith (customers were expecting instant processing, but this did not occur due to PayPal’s IPN (Instant Payment Notification) bug causing a loss of trust from customers expecting instant processing).

But due to a new bug merchants are now losing money directly due to PayPal’s code issues. PayPal merchants have the option of adding extra charges such as postage and packaging on-top of the cost for the item they are selling. On May 15th this charging feature stopped working. Some merchants are losing double digits on every order. To make matters worse PayPal have been very unspecific with the dates in which it will be fixed. Twelve days after the problem had occured PayPal was still unable to say when it might be fixed.

A reader at The Register, Alan Hatch stated,

“If PayPal said it would be weeks to fix, we’d do this,” he said, in an email. “We’d hate to re-price all the shipping and put the coding changes in just before they fix it and have to change it all back, which is why an ETA to fix or some basic information regarding the action they are taking would be very useful.”

A PayPal spokesman declared,

“We understand and recognize that for these merchants and their international customers, this is a serious issue… We apologize for the inconvenience that this is causing to their business. We are working to correct the problem and expect it will be fixed within the next few days.”

In our previous PayPal article, PayPal coders get sloppy with IPN, we finished with the following paragraph. We can save some time and energy by simply reusing it (will eBay/PayPal ever learn from it’s mistakes?).

This isn’t the first time PayPal has dropped the ball, recently they were ridiculed for poor security allowing hackers to generate convincing spoof pages allowing them to steal users secure information. This certainly won’t be the last of their problems. Its simple, PayPal needs to get a grip, they are too greater part of the internet to become careless.