To Paypal or NOT to Paypal…

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.

537 Comments

  1. I had not been receiving all of my notifications of payment, actually missed a couple of orders! When I called to find out what was going on I was told ” This happens from time to time, we send out one notice and do not check to see if it has been delivered.” So I have resorted to logging into paypal each day and checking my payments received.

  2. Statcounter is in the EU isn’t it? Google Checkout is only available for businesses in the US or UK I believe.

    I’ve been using Paypal for several years for my business and haven’t had any issues with them. However I’m doing a MUCH smaller volume of transactions than what Statcounter is.

  3. anyway paypal is very convenient indeed, most of my customers pay via pp with me, the only big problem is it require large handling fee, 35$ to withdraw to local banks if i don’t use hongkong bank accounts.
    Some of my friends like to use western union or moneygram to buy the auto diagnostic tools, and i gotta go to bank, fill out forms and get money, it is good when there are not many guys ahead in the queue! lol
    cheers

  4. I had problems with a Paypal chargeback a few years ago but since being acquired by Ebay I thought they had improved – clearly not.

    I recommend and use Moneybookers. Customer service is excellent and I find them efficient and reliable.

    As for Google – uggh. I almost hate them equally with a vengeance!

  5. Yeah… I do not like paypal. They tried sending me to collections for an item I bought on EBay. I never received the item and EBay took care of it on their end but since the person was paid on paypal they state I owe the money to them… Anyways, I stopped using paypal as a payment method for 3 of my companies and my personal business.

  6. by doing the poor service they create oppurtunity. competition is needed for better service.let other players to come

  7. I would go out of business before using paypal. I had an ebay auction , years ago, for an apple cd-rom out of an apple power book. The drive worked perfect… I had broken the screen (dropped it).. So I parted out the whole laptop. We;;, the person that bought the cd-rom filed a complaint and said it, and the cable I sent did not work. I responded to paypal (I never heard from the user that bought the rom and told them no problem, please have them return the products and I would refund the money. Well, paypal said the were going to be making a decision and let me know. Long story short, the user was allowed to keep the products AND the money. I never used them, or ebay again.. When I come across and affiliate that only pay via paypal. I dump them and never look back.

  8. Pay pal is a nightmare and they never resolve most of their issues. Your best bet would be to cancel them and use another service they are only good for those making purchases and treat their merchants with total disregard.

  9. I agree with Stat Counter regarding the inefficiency of Pay Pal. I cancelled my account with them too, after a stressful incident where they were too slow to react to a payment I sent to a company who did not deliver my order. It got sorted out evenutally, but was far too slow in their response and action.

  10. I think they suck too as there over the top charges if you were to send the money or receive it as one of my customers sent me and got charged so did i get charged too !! thats wrong !!!! there sneeky

  11. Google checkout is the most amazing and secure payment option yet other are trying to enhance their services but the value of trust wins by Google and Western Union.

  12. I’ve only been online a few months but I’m appalled at Paypal’s arrogance. In my long experience in business offline, I’ve only met a few companies that make up their own bizzarre anti-customer rules and then implement them on an apparently random basis. I know that ALL big companies are never wrong but PayPal must hold the record for telling it’s customers that black is white – they won’t even concede that black can possibly be pale grey occasionally. I loathe having to deal with them!
    Don

  13. Google checkout seems like a good option, but I’m not sure if they take subscription payments.

  14. I agree with Power Essence. Paypal does not have much competition. I wonder when paypal will get real competition. When there is more competition, I think paypal wil have to fix the problems in order to keep their customers.

  15. PayPal “holds” money from me and obviously use the funds to make invest and make profit. Image $4 x millions of accounts. They will hold parts of my money form sales for up to 3 months. Can you imagine a bank holding 20% of your checking account money for no reason? They are not a bank. In fact, all 3rd party credit card processors we’re named illegal when the internet was young and were closed or phased out, except PayPal and their powerful lobbying. It’s a criminal, unregulated mess over there. Use Google checkout or just get a regular merchant account and charge your customers once a month yourself.

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  17. When a company starts making so much money and has little competition, it seems perfectly acceptable for it to provide the absolute minimum level of service. And on top of that, increases their own charges with no justification, just because they CAN.

    Viva la moneyless revolution!

  18. Paypal is fine as long as you do not need customer service, every time I contact them they do nothing but sending out COPY & PASTE replies not even reading the original email, they are an awful service and you better cross your fingers that you never need to contact them over something because basically you will be on your own.

    My alternatives to Paypal are these:

    AlertPay: http://www.alertpay.com

    WireCard: http://www.wirecard.com/

    Payoneer: http://www.payoneer.com/

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