Quite unbelievably, despite reporting a problem to Paypal on 26 August, we have STILL not received confirmation that this problem has been resolved. Here’s the background…
-
On 26 August we identified a serious problem with Paypal.
StatCounter members who had upgraded in the previous few days had NOT been appropriately upgraded as the Paypal system stopped sending out subscription payment notifications. In fact new subscriptions were no longer created at all and payments received were not linked to StatCounter accounts.
In short, we were receiving hundreds of Paypal payments which we couldn’t link to any StatCounter account. As you can imagine, this caused serious difficulties for us.
We reported the problem to Paypal with as much supporting evidence as possible to assist them in quickly identifying the problem… but, as we have come to expect, the first response from Paypal completely ignored the information we supplied and denied the problem.
It’s now 5 WEEKS since we reported this issue to Paypal and we have STILL not received confirmation that this problem has been resolved. We feel we have been more than patient at this stage and remain astounded that any company can treat its customers with such disregard.
While we understand that ALL services can have problems from time to time we find Paypal’s habit of ignoring its customers to be abhorrent. We are particularly upset that Paypal’s poor behaviour can and does impact on you, our members, and also unfairly reflects on us.
Our Position
As a result of this Paypal problem, we had to manually examine hundreds of payments, attempt to link these to StatCounter accounts and where this wasn’t possible we had to contact the payees individually to request their StatCounter usernames. As you can imagine, this had a high cost for us in terms of time and resources. Further, although these problems were caused by Paypal, StatCounter has absorbed all the costs of this problem. We also felt it was only right for us to offer all affected members a free upgrade for one month to make amends for the problems. Paypal, of course, offered us (their customer) absolutely nothing by way of assistance for the trouble they caused us.
Unfortunately, we have been here before… At that time, we decided NOT to remove Paypal as a payment option for new subscribers. This was because we highly value each of our members and, despite OUR poor opinion of Paypal, we have to cater to what YOU, our members want. However, we are now again considering our position in relation to Paypal…
Your Feedback Please
Due to the problems outlined above, Paypal has been suspended as a payment option (for NEW subscriptions) on StatCounter since 26 August and remains so. We can’t possibly reactivate it until such time as Paypal confirms that the problems introduced in August have been fixed… but we have no idea when that will be. In the meantime, we’d like to ask you, our members, for your thoughts on this.
Both problems we have had with PayPal have been with their subscription payments. During this problem and the last one, regular Paypal manual payments appeared to be functioning normally. On this basis, we are wondering if we should STOP accepting PayPal subscriptions and accept only manual payments instead? Manual payments *would* require our upgraded customers to log in to Paypal every time a payment falls due… so perhaps we will have to restrict Paypal upgrades to quarterly or yearly – logging in every month to pay could be a bit too time consuming! We’re not sure about this idea, so do let us know your thoughts!
We’d also love to know what alternative payment options we can introduce to cater for your payment preferences.
Here are our initial thoughts…
- We need to accept Discover cards – if you can recommend an acquirer for a European company, please let us know
- We need to accept AMEX for USD payments – currently we can only accept AMEX directly for EUR payments
- We need to accept echecks – please let us know if you can recommend any echeck processors
Note that we already accept VISA, Mastercard, AMEX (for EUR payments), wire/bank transfer, EUR/USD checks/cheques.
Please post below with any other card or payment method you think we should accept and feel free to share any comments or suggestions you may have. Thanks folks.
UPDATE: Please note that existing, active Paypal subscriptions are not affected by the suspension of Paypal on StatCounter – this affects NEW subscriptions only.
>Further more if you Google “PayPal Sucks” you’ll find your one of 1000’s
> who’s had this experience.
Like I already stated, Paypal has millions and millions of customers. If there are only 1000’s of complaints…. I’d say Paypal is doing a pretty good job!
There are many xxx sucks websites… Google sucks, Yahoo sucks, AMEX sucks, or any credit card sucks, ebay sucks, moneybookers suck…. and on and on… I rarely meet a person who doesn’t have a gripe with something.
Yes, as a online vendor, even I once had trouble with Paypal but when it was not solved expeditiously, I brought my issue to the attention of higher management. Like I said before, all responsible businesses want to do right. They want to keep you as a customer. They are not out to scam you. All you need to do is bypass the incompetent and/or underpaid and/or low influence employee.
Enough with this nonsense. Getting rid of Paypal could mean losing potential customers who either do not trust another payment service or don’t want to pay directly by credit card.
My recommendation is to contact Paypal management and keep demanding to communicate with someone higher up in the food chain. Unfortunately, my contact (the person who resolved my issue) is no longer there (the email address fails) but that was three years ago. Anyhow, it worked for me… so hopefully you will have the same success.
A better alternative than PayPal is Moneybookers.
www.moneybookers.com/
I thought paypal accounts were usually tied to an email address, if YOUR accounts are email based ….. what is the problem? If you get a payment from ####@email account and you have a client with ####@email, how hard is it to put them together?
Is this a Paypal problem or a StatCounter problem?
As a business owner I’ll make this statement – I too had a serious problem with Pay-Pal and learned that they are not MY Pal to the tune of 32,000.00
I learned they are NOT a bank and pretty much do anything they want. Your screwed as they are not covered by ANY banking regulations.
Further more if you Google “PayPal Sucks” you’ll find your one of 1000’s who’s had this experience.
In France, Paypal is not really as good as it should be.
For My Business, i don”t use it. I do prefer credit card, even troubles exists to.
Thanx for information
Hopefully, you will never have a problem with Paypal. If that is the case, having a well developed savings account can give you the money you need to open that new web site or take part in a new investment. Once you get to enough money to cover you for three months in the event of an emergency, you can begin treating your savings account payment as a bill from every check. Having that extra cash around can be a life saver.
Wow, cool post, I was thinking how to do that. and found across your website from msn, many excellent information here, now that I’ve got some idea. I’ve bookmarked your website and also added rss. Please take a look at my site: online dating and please keep us updated about your site :-), thanks!….
I have used PayPal for a number of years and except for a few times when certain cards would not work with my set-up, I have been very satisfied with their service.
Their fees might be a little high but the convenience for me is worth it.
I believe all merchant services have problems at times.
I had an online vendor run my PayPal account into the “RED” after I was dissatisfied with his service and terminated my usage of his pathedic service. PayPal has a $500.00 limit on my account now and they won’t issue me a PayPal debit card.
I think PayPal recently had something to do with my Netspend.com account being unaccessible “There seems to be a problem with your account, please call bla, bla, bla.”
You used to be able to get a PayPal account with a Netspend card, no physical bank needed, they (PayPal) probably screwed that up too.
There’s got to be a more reliable and dependable way to do online currency transactions (hopefully one that has an encrypted “Pay Now” button).
Google owns paypal, Google has google analytics, maybe you are perceived as competition
Industrial espionage so to speak
With PayPal’s recent introduction into South Africa I would avoid them like the plague. Considering the amount of credit card fraud in SA, PayPal is heading for big problems.
I agree with the AlertPay suggestion. I ended my relationship with PayPal years ago due their constant security checks holding up payments for days. And with Epassporte’s recent passing, AlertPay now seems the better option.
I cant even tell you the Horror stories ,or the horrific experiences I have had with PayPal.They almost ruined my life because they held ALL of my money without warning .This was my only income at the time .I now use Alert Pay.No problems at all with them for 4 mos now. You might try them Good luck with PayPal.You will need it
As with most larger American businesses it’s all about money and PayPal (and parent Ebay) has contracted its customer no-service to the cheapest Indian subcontinent outfit it could find where the “staff” have little or no English skills. A month or so ago I wasted a few minutes of my life on the ‘phone with a female Ebay customer service rep who had an impenetrable accent and she neither able to understand the emails I had sent nor what I was saying. As is often the case with Asian customer service people, when sh couldn’t cope, she disconnected.
Some years ago I was party to a class action suit against PP. They had charged my bank account and my credit card and refused to refund one of them telling me that it was the vendor’s fault and they had done it to others as well. I did get some money and PP did improve for a while thereafter but they’re going downhill again fast.
Whatever you do, NEVER go with an outfit called Moneybookers, they’re worse than PP.
Good Luck!
This is really very bad. PayPal is not caring about its users. Being the pioneer in the market it does not mean that they will not care about there users. PayPal has a lot of such issues. Hope they will soon resolve this, otherwise people will start switching to the alternatives.
Same here, been using PayPal for over 5 years as a seller and to date I have NEVER experienced a problem whatsoever. Guess I’m just lucky.
I have been using Statcounter for about 5 years. Love it. I always recommend it to others.
I am in the process of building a site with a small webshop and I was going to go down the Paypal road, but will definitely think twice now. I am also not ready to use a new system that has not been tried and tested by enough people, but I am going to research all of the suggestions above. Google checkout could be the option. Yes Google are big (maybe a little too big) but I have used google services for as long as I can remember, so that may be a good bet.
I wish that was true, at least it would be interesting.
i think Paypal have a lot of problems last time, and it’s time to look for a change, a lot of country can’t send and receive payement frome paypal, it’s a big Shit..Moneybooker will domaine the net
Paypal is the worst in terms of service, customer care and in solving problems, they need to come to standards for bigger customers, but a great system for those who transact in pennies