PayPal: Worst. Support. Ever!
If you read our blog often, you might get the impression we’ve got something against PayPal; well, as of today, I for one officially do.
First: a FreshBooks support story
Today one of our clients’ staff members called in with a problem she was experiencing: some reporting features weren’t working the way she expected.
First I took the time to go through exactly what she was doing, step by step. This always works far better than the usual “describe your problem” you’ll often get elsewhere, because instead of trying to interpret their words, you can just hit that stumbling block right there with the user; it’s like the mechanic hopping in your passenger’s seat. Nobody does that anymore, but it’s still the only way to be sure.
While I was looking at their FreshBooks system, though, I noticed last month’s payment hadn’t gone through.
A glitch in the matrix
We use PayPal’s Payflow Pro product for charging our users. Logging into their system, it appeared the regular monthly transaction had simply declined.
This happens all the time, and it’s often a bank issue; heck, the same user successfully made a separate purchase hours later, so obviously this was just a hiccup. Normally our system resolves these “hiccups” a day later. But for some reason that hadn’t happened here, so the account was past-due—but the user hadn’t done anything wrong!
Since their next regular monthly payment is due tomorrow, I wasn’t just going to retry the payment—the problem wasn’t their fault, so it wouldn’t be very polite to charge them twice within a few hours. So I called the client, explained, and apologized for what happened. Thankfully he was very gracious about the situation, and said it would be fine to charge his card twice.
So after thanking him and hanging up, I clicked the button to retry the payment. That was when I got a very odd error message (which seems to be PayPal’s specialty):
Error: Error in forcing the recurring profile payment: Cannot force a future payment
Admittedly, I did not invent the Gregorian calendar. But to my knowledge, September 13, 2007 is not in the future.
Next: a PayPal support nightmare
I phoned PayPal. After a few minutes navigating their automated system, I waited ten minutes before I had a service representative on the other end. It quickly became clear neither her, nor her technician’s manual, had ever used Payflow Pro before.
I explained my situation, and she seemed very confused. Since there was no number accompanying the error message, she said she couldn’t look it up. So she decided the error message didn’t matter; instead she just spent the next five minutes repeating, “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”
For those of you who don’t speak technical gobbledygook, she was saying it isn’t possible to retry a declined payment. (Yeah, it must have been one of those single-use credit cards.)
Trying not to get frustrated, I asked why there was a retry button, why I was receiving an error I’d never received before, why the error message was complaining about the transaction being in the future, why she was calling something impossible that I do multiple times every single day.
So she put me on hold while she went to talk to her supervisor… for ten minutes.
From bad to worse
When she finally returned, her first words were, “are you still there?”
(Folks: if you put somebody on hold long enough that you have to ask if they bothered to stay on the line, that’s a bad thing.)
I replied with a “yes,” only to have her repeat what I’m guessing is PayPal’s new mantra: “you can’t re-process if the card failed with response code 12.”
Apparently those ten minutes were spent fixing a sandwich.
There were no higher-level support folks I could talk to, she said; she’d already talked to her supervisor, and that was all she could do. The error was because I was trying to do the impossible. If there was anything wrong with the gateway, it already would have been fixed. Up is down, the sun revolves around the earth, there are five lights. Thank you and goodbye.
Dejected, angry, yet not the least bit surprised, I hung up, having re-affirmed everything I ever believed about PayPal.
In conclusion
For what it’s worth, before VeriSign sold Payflow Pro to PayPal, the interface and support for this service were amazing. So VeriSign, if you’re listening… could you buy Payflow back?
And to the rest of you, could you share some of your horror stories? I could use a little consolation here.
users collect enough money to buy all 
9:38 pm
Sounds like a nightmare. There really is nothing worse than spending so much time trying to resolve an issue and walking away with that unsatisfied, I just wasted my time feeling.
BTW, are you trying to win the ticket to the SEED conference with this story? Are you eligible? Can I just submit this story?
SB
11:17 am
I hear you, I have had to try to deal with PayPal’s support a few times in the past.
First Story: A few years ago, I made a very large purchase and I paid via PayPal. Well, I had made a special arrangement with the seller, but when I paid via Check Card, the fees he were hit with were too large for him to handle. So he refunded the payment and asked that I use an Echeck instead.
I quickly whet ahead and send the echeck, thinking everything was okay. The next day, I logged in to find out that even though the seller had refunded my original purchase, the funds weren’t back in my bank yet.
Well needless to say, when I called PayPal, I sat on hold for 25 minutes listening to the loop of “paypal is the greatest” narration on top of the peppy elevator music. Finally somone answered and after I explained the problem and said that I would like them to NOT process the e-check yet, they kept saying there was nothing they could do about it and the system would try to processes it THREE times. I asked why, and they said “there’s nothing we can do about it”. I kept thinking “great, you already told me what you can’t do, what CAN you do?”
When all was said and done, I had spent about 4 hours on the phone (about half of that was on hold) and got nothing accomplished. Over the course of the next week, I had 2 NSF fees thrown on my bank account when the first, and the 3rd one happened to go through because the money finally landed in my account.
I had never had something like this happen, and the PayPal rep never mentioned that I’d be hit with NSF charges from my bank. (maybe I should have known this, but I didn’t) If I had known that was going to happen, I could have easily borrowed the money from someone else for a week.
So then I spent another hour on the phone with them reaming them out for not being able to stop a transaction I asked them too and asking that they credit me the amount of the NSF charges. That got me nowhere very fast, until I decided it wasn’t worth the time I was spending on the phone.
I went into my bank the next day and explained it to them, and the lady I talked to said “sounds like it was fraudulent activity if you asked them not to charge you and they did anyway. I’ll just take the NSF fees off of your account, how does that sound”
I accomplished more in 5 minutes at the bank than I would have in an entire lifetime talking to PayPal. How bad is that?
11:28 am
Second Story: I use PayFlow Pro for my Freshbooks billing also. I signed up for it when I started my business, which was before I had any business accounts setup. I chose to have them charge my personal card every month.
Now I do have a business card, so I figured “hey, I’ll just go in and give them my new card number”… NOPE!!! I can’t find anywhere to change my billing….
Remembering my previous battle, I decided to email them instead. I like to give plenty of details because I think it helps track the problem down faster….
Day 1: No response
Day 2: No response
Day 3: No response
Day 4: No response
Day 5: No response
Day 6: “Thank you for contacing PayPal support, I only read enough of your email to see if that you want to change your card number so follow these copy-and-paste instructions that I didn’t even read and you’ll be happy as a duck.”
Well, the instructions included the exact steps I had tried “And referred to in my email”… After all, I did try the “help” links that they have thinking they might actually be helpful, and hey, if the option was where it was supposed to be, it would have worked.
So then I email them back and tell them I already tried those steps, please help!
Day 1: No response
Day 2: No response
Day 3: No response
Day 4: No response
Day 5: No response
Day 6: No response
Day 7: No response
Day 8: No response
Day 9: “Thank you for contacing PayPal support, I only read enough of your email to see if that you want to change your card number so follow these copy-and-paste instructions.”
The funny thing, the instructions were to do something completely different so I think they sent me the wrong answer. Ok, I’ll email them again.
The next day I got “Vor kurzem haben Sie persönliche Unterstützung von unserem Online-Unterstützungscenter angefordert. Weiter unten finden Sie eine Zusammenfassung Ihrer Frage und unsere Antwort.”
That’s just the first couple sentences. Yes, I took a year of German in high school years ago.. But as fun as it sounds, I don’t want you to switch languages on me because you can’t even help me in English.
I think I’ve given up and decided that I’ll just keep the billing on my personal card. Hopefully someday it’ll expire and they will call me asking for a new card number.
We’ll see.
3:01 pm
So why are you all STILL using PayPal?
There are tons of other merchant account options out there to choose from! All I know is, if I got treated like that by someone i’m doing business with, I’m GONE! No questions asked, no second chances. If you beat me once shame on you, but beat me twice, it’s shame on me, because I allowed it.
9:09 pm
Payflow Pro – 2 Weeks of HELL!!
It is amazing – I AM NOT ALONE. I thought it was me that could not get help with PayFlow Pro.
I have a client who requested that I help get PayFlow Pro working on there site since they could not get it to work with there test script. There entire intentions was to use PayFlow Pro on a shopping cart but first was testing with an online test script. Apparently the main issue was on PayFlow Pro end. First we had problems with resetting the password on the account and each time that we reset the password we still could not get our test script to work. After about 4-5 days of working with PayPal we finally got someone with brains and not reading a manual on the other end. It seems that everyone you call at PayPal has to read a manual or refer to the developer forums to get answers for PayFlow Pro. Day 10 we finally got our test script to work with PayFlow pro. Now we ported the information over to the shopping cart that we where using. Still nothing. I checked the script based off what paypal has on there site and the one that we where using for Virtuemart (a shopping cart for Joomla!) and could not figure out what the issue was. I had contact PayFlow Pro and they said that they would check out the scripts. I was like – wow – this is going to be great. 5 days later no reply. I finally took it upon myself by doing a line by line comparison and finally found the problem. 2 weeks later I get the client up and running – Now why is it that PayFlow Pro can’t do a simple job a first or secondly return calls or emails?
Thank you payflow pro for being such a pro at things. Thank you Freshbooks for being fresh with things. Thank you Aaron for bringing to light the issues that the world has at hand. Now I would like to provide a solution to EVERYONE’s issue: BOYCOTT!!!!! Yep – it starts with one and ends with everyone. Lets boycott till we get the proper support.
Okies that is my small rant.
–Steven Pignataro
http://www.corephp.com
5:53 am
I live in Spain, and have clients all over the world. I have stopped dealing with any company that uses Paypal, as paypal themselves are incapable of dealing with Spanish addresses or credit cards issued to a Spanish address (even though they may be issued in another country).
I always tell the people who I am not going to deal with why I am doing it and suggest to them that they look to another supplier. Worldpay by contrast is an excellent provider, and has no problem dealing with any address anywhere in the world – including my clients in deepest Africa!
If we all adopt this policy then perhaps Paypal will do something about it or even go out of business.
11:33 am
I too am amazed at the lack of PayPal’s professionalism when I had the lovely fortune of having to talk to their service reps.
Does anyone have any recommendations for alternatives to the PayFlow Pro solution?
12:11 pm
Well, keeping everyone updated on the story so far, we’ve received three calls from PayPal so far this morning.
To be honest, I don’t know how I feel about that… I think it sends the message that being a paying customer isn’t as important as being a relatively well-read blogger.
Maybe it’s a good thing though, I’m certainly not going to slam them for trying to remedy a poorly handled situation! I was admittedly a little surprised that the third person who called (I was out of the office for the first two) was only calling to get my details, and now plans to have somebody call me back. But at least she was a straight-shooter, admitting she knew nothing about Payflow.
We’ll see where this goes. The epic saga continues, I guess…
12:19 am
The problem is (as you pointed out) that you have to publicly embarass PayPal to get them to act professionally and respectfully. I’ve shared your post with some other friends and they have also described similar poor experiences with PayPal. One of my colleagues swears he’ll never deal with them ever again. Unfortunately, I don’t think this particular incident is going to inspire them to improve their service long-term. They don’t realize how much they’re fueling competition.
11:52 am
Well, here’s the cherry on top.
Following the call I detailed in my comment above, PayPal never called back.
Oops.
12:32 pm
Well, appreciate the offer, but it really just reminded me of an earlier question I forgot to answer.
Because switching payment gateways is a huge undertaking the way we’re doing things. It’ll certainly be possible eventually, but for now it’s simply not an option. They’ve got us right where they want us, basically.
They were down again this morning, too. Internal server errors and such… sigh.
3:59 pm
What about building your own gateway or payment system using Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service?
4:28 pm
Paypal stopped working for us about 8am this morning; every transaction times out with a -12 response code. They insist it’s related to some sort of reporting outage, but are:
a) unable to provide an ETA that it’s being fixed
b) unwilling to provide status updates other than “I’ll email you when it’s fixed”
c) unable to escalate the issue to a supervisor
d) unable to provide updates after 5pm eastern (rapidly approaching) since that’s when everyone in the Payflow Pro group goes home
Frustrated to say the least; we’re losing tens of thousands of dollars an hour in sales.
4:57 pm
I’m sorry to hear that. We started experiencing problems with PayPal this morning as well; I was tempted to blog about it, but it felt like kicking them while they’re (quite literally) down would be wrong somehow.
Instead, I’ll just share some imagery. Here’s this morning’s results of our login attempts to Payflow Pro:
They’ve really raised the bar with this one, I think.
And, while completely unrelated to this morning’s difficulties, here’s the results of an attempt to pay an invoice via PayPal a few days ago with a perfectly valid American Express card:
Apparently I’m supposed to start collecting credit cards, and PayPal will just randomly decide which ones it’s in the mood to accept.
5:04 pm
Sam, I’m not sure if you might have caught it, but we’re actually one of the first integrators with Amazon’s Flexible Payments Service. We plan to be ready to launch when they emerge from their Limited Beta and get things opened up to the general public.
We’ve got a blog post where you can read all about the FreshBooks integration with Amazon FPS, along with some of its key benefits.
10:08 am
I used to use paypal but won’t anymore either. I did a small shopping cart for a client one time.A year and a half later she decided after moving out of state that she didn’t like it and wanted her money back. she contacted paypal who contacted me and then denied her claim because it was over a year after the work had been done.
i thought it was the end f the story. nope, she then called amex and disputed the charge with them saying it wasn’t what she wanted. amex contacted paypal. they contacted me i pointed out that California state law prohibits claims of this nature after a certain time had passed. i sent them a copy of the law, a link to the attorney generals website where it has a complete copy of the law, emails and other documentation i had showing the work had been done. plus, the fact that i had been paid after the work was done showed she was happy with it.
Did any of that matter? No. Paypal does not fight chargebacks. Apparently, from what I have read, they have a really low rate with the credit card companies and one way to ensure that is to not fight them. Of curse, that was demonstrated nicely when her claim was shot down the first time around when it was just a paypal complaint. Once it went to her credit card company then it was all over.
I fought with paypal for a month over this. The entire time the dispute was going on it was hard to get in touch with a rep. When I did, they seemed very supportive. But it was just a sham.
They never gave me a reason whey refunded the money. They just took it out of my account and gave it back. Of course, it over drew my paypal account because I didn’t have the money in there. Fortunately, they couldn’t take it from my linked up checking account or credit card. I let them close my account. Screw them.
As a seller, I would be very afraid to ever sell through paypal because at any time, the buyer could decide they want their money back and they’d get it. That’s not a good feeling at all.
12:54 am
I have a terrible experience with paypal. I have got an email early in the morning that my account access is limited due to third party access. I have call them and as usual wait around 15 mins to get a live person. then I describe my situation she told me to hold again. after 10 mins another one told me to explain the situation again. And finally she told me that she is on my account and everything will be fine within 5 mins.
After 10 mins I login to my account and nothing. I got another email that I need to do my final step by adding another credit card and while I tried to add credit card it shows you can’t for limited access!
What a support! Looking for alternative.
4:51 pm
I hate Paypal resoulution area!!! they need to cut the waiting time but 75% and need to be trained more!!
1:01 am
When I was reading what you wrote I felt like it was my case. Pay pal did the same to me with a different business. Pay pal take from my account money to refund to the buyers three times. Because Pay pal gave the reason to them. But in these three cases they never returned the merchandise to me. I wrote many letters, I called many times. Pay pal never response my request, they never understand my request. I lost this money and the merchandise too. Pay pal it’s a nightmare. I don’t know how I was with Pay pal for three years. They still collection to me, without any reason. ?
I don’t know what to do. I lost too much money with them and I can’t reclaim. To whom I could claim?
5:03 am
Beware paypal nearly destroy my business, I will never use again!!!
I have website payments pro account to process payments for my business with then for the last 5 months the put 4 limitations on my account which we are unable to do northing. If you depend on Paypal to receive payments for your business this will put you in bad situation trust me very bad situation. the phone customer services is worst ever we deal with they will not resolve the issues on your account, will ask you to send email which take long to get reply back. Please don’t do it the same mistake we did it, find another reliable company. They don’t want small business to grow alone special because they belongs to eBay which they want every business to sale thought eBay ending up paying fees to eBay and Paypal
I hope this will open eyes for the people who are interest to use Paypal. I will not recommend this to nobody.
6:05 am
I am having a nightmare with PAYPAL … i tried to transfer £700 to my girlfriend … paypal are holding the money while they investigate fraud !!!
OMG they can see exactly where my moneyu came from … most of it from my own bank account …
I am at this very moment on hold to paypal after miraculously managing to get through the worst automated phone system ever !!! i have sent countless emails to paypal about the situation with my account and my money and havent heard anything back from them … so its ok to grab somebody’s money and leave them waiting for days without any corrospondence ??? dreadful service …
3:47 pm
As e-Business developers, we use to recommended Verisign’s Payflow Pro Solution because we felt it was the strongest and most reliable solution available. Since PayPal acquired the solution in 2006, we can no longer make the same claim.
For over six weeks we have been trying to get PayPal to correct an intermittent API response problem, which began for one of our clients after PayPal worked on solving a duplicate supression problem. Duplicate supression is now correctly working (it only took countless phone calls, e-mails and trouble-ticket updates to get PayPal to solve that) but we are now no longer receiving every API response for each request submitted.
Even though we’ve clearly explained to them that nothing has changed on our server and none of the site’s programming has changed, they still want to point the finger at us. …Telling us we’re probably blocking port 443, etc. Are they serious?! We do not block port 443 on our servers, as it’s essential for SSL to work correctly.
We really wish PayPal would take responsibility and correct the problem they clearly caused on their end, while solving a seperate problem.
7:24 am
Pay Pal are a pain in the butt to develop for… I found google checkouts much better even though you have to create secoundary services for notifications that follow after payments. Worth a look.
7:16 pm
I just found Paypal to have the worst customer support in recent history of all the financial institutions I have phoned. Utterly useless. they finally gave me a technical support 800 number and it took me back to the same awful support menu I began with. I am trying to understand how to download my transactions into Quicken but it is hopeless.
12:08 pm
Upon finding a glitch in the most recent version of the PayPal browser plugin, I clicked the link in the plugin to “Report a problem.” It opened an email addressed to plugin-feedback@paypal.com. So far so good, right? I described the bug (plugin conflicts with Firefox’s builtin autocomplete feature, and its own autocomplete doesn’t work any better), steps to reproduce, expected vs. actual results.
First I got a response from Nathan, explaining that my request had reached PayPal Merchant Technical Services and that they have nothing to do with the plugin. For plugin support I needed to fill out a PayPal Customer Service ticket online. So I copied & pasted my note to the web form and submitted.
“Dino” responded, explaining why the closed lock symbol might not appear on the page.
Hoping that this was accidental, I sent a reply asking them to reread my request, as the response received is unrelated to my query.
I’ve just gotten a response from Tanenpo explaining how I can tell whether or not the plugin is installed.
Okay guys… making me jump through hoops to help PayPal is not helping PayPal.
5:41 pm
Pay Pal has to be the worst company I have ever done business with. They locked my funds and now I can’t access them at all. They are asking for a ton of personal information and treating me like I did something wrong. I have heard that they freeze peoples accounts and don’t let them access money so they can gain interest from the balances. This is so wrong. How can they get away with it?
12:18 am
Nice to know these things before getting caught up. I never really liked PayPal because I always felt they put too little in and should improve integration. They should be following up, not the user.