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Joined: 3/3/2006(UTC)
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Holy Cow! I just had a 6 hour long encounter - it's been going on all day - just trying to order a few books on-line. I've had a PP account for years and have never been so chopped up and spit out by a website like I was today. I've got 9 emails telling me all kinds of stuff that went wrong all day long, and a few more that are telling me my account's been refunded and then charged again and credited..... and.... Jeesh! I tried to place the order three times (the 3rd was just for kicks).
It wasn't a BVC site - That tells me that Paypal isn't particularly user friendly anywhere else either. I now know that it isn't the webmaster's fault, so take heart all.... stick with it and maybe you can someday make it work. All the more reason to see abandoned carts and attempted purchases. It's likely to get worse in the future, not better.
I'll NEVER EVER subject my shoppers to that. I finally gave up and used a cc on the phone. I had to tell them what's going on. The store owner had NO IDEA until he looked at his log, something he hadn't done in a long time. There were a bunch of lost sales on his events log. |
Optimists invent airplanes,
Pessimists buy parachutes. |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 12/23/2003(UTC)
Posts: 909
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we dropped paypal a long time ago, there were a couple complaints but on the administrative side the problems immediately disappeared and the few complaints that we received were solved.
we still use paypal but only behind the scenes for select customers & dealers. I'm on the anti-paypal side of the fence :shocked: |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 6/6/2005(UTC)
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I hate those people. They are right up next to TPC (The Phone Company) on my list. If I find something I want on a web site that only offers PayPal, I call them and beg for another method of payment.
Now I do think they have a use on an Ebay type site where pretty much anybody can open an account and sell stuff, but even than you can be taken to the cleaners.
Bob Noble
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Rank: Member
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PayPal has it's share of problems, but I wouldn't say none of the blame lies on the webmasters, as Mitch mentioned. Mitch, your issue sounds much more like webmaster error than PayPal error.
I've had quite a few more issues with common payment processors than with PayPal itself. A lot of the issues I've had with PayPal have been due to a store's logic being screwed up mixed with not utilizing the PayPal API correctly. |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 3/3/2006(UTC)
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PP doesn't make it as easy as the majors. For a service that promotes ease of use and increased shopper's confidence they miss the mark miserably. We've got some smart people here and at other cart's forums, and we're all still having problems. PP can take some a majority share of the blame here.
I'll give it a shot when I don't dread an attempt to hook up. |
Optimists invent airplanes,
Pessimists buy parachutes. |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 11/18/2003(UTC)
Posts: 1,465
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Wow, I guess I live on another planet. As many of you know I've written some code over the years for well, umm, my fair share of payment gateway API's and I can tell you right now - They ALL have issues. I've seen some horrible payment gateways, some terrible API's and what should be some simple made so hard.
PayPal is not a payment gateway - ok well it is now but that is not where it started. Think about it, anyone with a bank account can buy something from you even without a credit card. It allows you to take money from someone and make a sell when you might not have if you only offered CC's as a payment method.
People have problems with purchasing online because, well lets be honest they have no clue what they are doing. Unlike some of us, most did not grow up with a computer in their back pocket. No matter how simple a payment form is, customers get caught up in the most simple things. Now when you couple this with moron merchants that have no business taking peoples money online you just have a e-commerce meltdown.
So Mitch, you purchased using PayPal and the store owner had no idea how the heck to mange his integration and you think this is a problem with PayPal? How much easier do you want it? Do you know that you can open a PayPal account, stick some pre-made html on your web page which generates a buy button and have people buying things from you in no time? I mean seriously, when you are transferring people to a hosted paypal payment form what more do you want?
Maybe, just maybe store owners who read a few books or web pages about opening an online store should pause for a minute and understand that maybe, just maybe they should think about hiring someone who know what the heck they are doing when it comes to online store building. Have you thought about how scary it is that there are thousands of merchants selling online and taking your personal info and CC details that are never stored correctly or safely?
Like many other things in life, people always want to point the finger and forget about personal responsibility. Shame.
p.s. excuse the spelling and grammar issues. It's late and I'm sleepy :) |
TIM
BVC Add-Ons and Development |
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Rank: Member
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Tim, welcome back, it's been four months... where you been?
You are making my point at 4am. It should be roll-off-the-wall simple yet, it gets screwed up over and over by some pretty smart people. So.... it must not be so simple then, HUH?
Read the PP related posts here and at 10 other ecommerce sites. Yes, EVERYONE is having problems with PP. So how is this not PP's fault - or at least... how is this not PP's missed opportunity to make it easier to integrate? For the entire time I was with anotherstore6, PP integration was a hot topic on the forums.
For PP it's a numbers game, 85% success is profitable enough. |
Optimists invent airplanes,
Pessimists buy parachutes. |
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Rank: Member
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Originally Posted by: "MitchA" 
how is this not PP's missed opportunity to make it easier to integrate?
That's it exactly. Their integration continues to evolve, but I'm not sure they have made success more likely.
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Rank: Member
Joined: 3/3/2006(UTC)
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Andy, can you imagine your customers having PP-type problems while integrating your add-ons? |
Optimists invent airplanes,
Pessimists buy parachutes. |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 5/24/2004(UTC)
Posts: 4,147
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Sorry to spark this, I wasn't coming to PayPal's defense, but I do use it a lot. Just noting that the major issues that I've seen or experienced, exactly like the issue Mitch initially posted, have been largely due to store logic issues or library used. The greatest APIs in the world won't save you from that because they are the end point and are built to be flexible.
Andy's (killer) products are plugins, which can't be compared to writing your own code to access another service. This type of integration is an entirely different ballgame.
We did PayPal integration into kingofthelist.com a couple months ago and have had no problems that weren't related to our own code before going live, which was easy to adjust. The right library can make it roll-off-the-wall simple, but an API for doing everything that PayPal can do with something as serious as money can never be that simple. And smart has nothing to do with it if you don't 'get it'.
Whether their integration is as good as it can be, I don't know. A big part of that may be on the library chosen to access their API, which is often the case. There are so many layers involved, it's difficult for me to act like I have one individual opponent when playing the blame game. |
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Originally Posted by: "Cliff"
Andy's (killer) products are plugins, which can't be compared to writing your own code to access another service. This type of integration is an entirely different ballgame.
Thank you for the compliment! (My nickname from 8th-10th grade was "killer" because I was somewhat successful at wrestling). I'm glad my products hide the nitty-gritty so well...because all of them access multiple external services. In my mind that is exactly the value I add...mashing together multiple services into a self-contained, drop-in unit that "just works". I have avoided the payment processors because they are so well served by Codesine, nSoftware, and others. My perception from the outside is that PayPal's API changes more frequently than say Authorize.Net's and that the changes are more profound over time (e.g. within 2-3 releases there may be breaking changes). As an example, the PayFlow Pro API (another PayPal API which we are discussing on another thread) changed 3 times from 7/2007 to 2/2008 and the release from 7/2007 has already reach end-of-life. That's a lot of change, and it makes all implementations fragile. The bottom line is that the PayPal implementation will probably remain more fragile than Authorize.Net for the next several years. By way of comparison, Google Checkout changes even more frequently (on the order of weeks and sometimes days instead of months). Therefore I suspect that Google Checkout will end up being more fragile than PayPal over the next few years. |
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Rank: Member
Joined: 5/24/2004(UTC)
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Hah, you shouldn't have told me that. :)
Great observations. I hadn't considered how frequently the next generation of payment services change. I wonder how often support for older integrations are broken. A good, slightly-related example may be the Amazon integration in BVC2004, which seems to have been rendered useless relatively quickly. It never really hit me until just now what a full-time job depending on web services really is. |
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