Category Archives: PayPal

PayPal Doesn’t Mind Fraud?

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We use PayPal exclusively (for better or worse) to collect payments on one of the e-commerce sites I manage. Recently, we noticed a lot of suspicious transactions being allowed through PayPal. High dollar value, Overnight Shipping, to shipping addresses that didn’t match billing addresses. What was odd is it seemed like it was happening all of a sudden. Turns out, we’d been hit be what appeared to be the same group for about 12 days.

I was really shocked this problem just popped up because you’d think PayPal would be on top of this sort of thing and let us know of suspicious transactions. Well, that isn’t the case. I’m not 100% sure if PayPal changed something in account settings or not, but it turns out that we had all of our Risk Controls set to Accept. Now, I’ve never seen this stuff before in our PayPal profile, but I also don’t manage the PayPal account on a daily basis.

What I found shocking, and absolutely ridiculous, is that PayPal didn’t set the defaults for these settings to the safest possible, but the unsafest. We were set to accept all transactions, regardless of address verification, credit card security verification, and a whole bunch of other settings. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. The only reason I actually looked was that I had posed my problem to the PayPal Developer Community. Needless to say I locked the entire account down so we were as safe as possible, but I just couldn’t believe PayPal would do this by default.

It seems obvious, since PayPal isn’t a bank or even your typical credit card processor, that PayPal is just interested in collecting its fees. They probably could care less about you as a merchant and how you need protected. I’m sure we’ll be investigating other processors (which I know there are plenty of out there) to use in the future. PayPal just doesn’t seem to be the safest way to pay (pun totally intended).

What’s Wrong with PayPal Customer Service?

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We’re getting close to launching our Import Costumes web site which is integrated with PayPal’s Web Payments Pro.  When we set up our PayPal business account 2 months ago, we had some hiccups setting up some of their services on our account, but were told that we were good with the Web Payments Pro part which would be used to take payments over the web.  Alas, that wasn’t the case. 

When I went to test the live site, I found that our PayPal account was "not configured configured" properly.  After 20 minutes on the phone with PayPal customer service, I found out that it wasn’t even set up for Web Payments Pro.  What?!?!  So now I can’t take payments after being told during setup that we would have no problem doing so.

What has ensued over the last week is complete madness.  Ten plus hours on the phone with various customer service reps (sometimes late at night here on the east coast).  Misinformation, lack of information, long hold times, and general disinterest in getting my issue resolved.  I’ve even been hung up on twice (the last time 10 minutes before I started this post).  We’re finally getting close to the end of the whole ordeal, only to find out we can’t have our issue expedited or even talk to someone about making sure they have exactly what they need.  Its a complete wait and see while throwing darts at a board with PayPal.  Hopefully we can get this resolved soon so we can start taking orders.  That being said, I have some suggestions for PayPal:

  1. Every customer issue should be given a Case Number.  Its such a waste of time to re-explain your problem to different customer service agents.  With an Case Number, ANY customer service agent can look it up and read what has already transpired (see Apple‘s customer service system).
  2. PayPal has a cool fax system where you can send them secure faxes with a barcode on them.  It kind of stinks that it allegedly takes up to 24 hours for the fax to hit the system, but when it does, it’d be nice to know it has been received.  The last set of documents I sent them have apparently been received and are under review, but I had no idea until I called, got transfered 3 times, put on hold, then hung up on.  This brings me to the next point…
  3. Train your customer service people properly to know where to transfer calls to.  Its annoying to go from a support agent when you have an account issue only to find yourself talking to someone in sales.
  4. Have the decency to not hang up on your customers.  If its your phone system’s fault, fix it.
  5. PayPal needs to remember that the only reason they make money is because their customers make money.  If you have someone calling in stating that they can’t make money because of their issue, there needs to be some way of expediting their issue to get it taken care of.  Especially in the case of a business (not to knock on personal PayPal account holders who I’m sure make a lot of money on eBay).  If a business isn’t making money with their PayPal integration (i.e. losing money), PayPal is losing money too.
  6. When a customer has an account setup issue, its not fair to just state that what they’re trying to do isn’t allowed and is outlined in the terms of service.  How many people actually read that stuff anyway?  Build your website with better error handling and direct the customer to steps to resolve their issue.
  7. Lastly, hire friendly customer service agents.  Its a real downer, especially when you’re already frustrated, to talk to some monotonous, boring, unfriendly and unsympathetic voice on the other end of the phone (again, see Apple’s customer service as an example).

I honestly think PayPal (with its merger into eBay), has become so huge, they’ve lost sight of the prize.  Happy customers.  I’m sure there are plenty of them out there, but right now, I’m not one of them.

PayPal Web Payments Pro Testing

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It appears that testing PayPal’s Web Payments Pro in their Sandbox doesn’t work like it would in a live environment. It won’t return error codes for address verification failures out of the box unless you set it up to do so. I was lucky enough to get a response in the developer forum that showed me this blog post on how to test AVS failures.

Also, it doesn’t look like you can test Discover Card or American Express credit cards in the Sandbox either. If there are any PayPal developers out there that come across this blog post, that’s a feature I’d like to see! I need to know that my code works 100% before it goes live!

Paypal Sandbox & Web Payments Pro

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We’re integrating Paypal’s Web Payments Pro into a new e-commerce site we’re building. To test, we set up our Paypal Sandbox account and began the process of setting up the Web Payments Pro account that we’d need. Interestingly, when I got to the part when it asked for a social security number, it wouldn’t validate the number. Also, there was no business owner address displayed there, which I believe was the cause of the issue. After about an hour and change on the phone trying to talk to the right technical person at Paypal, I was finally told that I could put in a fake social security number, as long as it began with ‘111’. Wow, awesome. Off and running. Now wouldn’t that be useful information in the development docs or maybe even on the site?