PayPal goes offline again PayPal suffered another embarrassing outage last night, and was unavailable for about four hours from 6.30pm UK time - one of the busiest times on eBay. The preferred payment service for the tat bazaar was last unavailable for several hours in late June, which really isn't great for a payment service: particularly one which …
Just underlines what I've always said really - paypal is pretty darn rubbish. Still lets not exaggerate here El Reg, the bidding on auctions on eBay is time-sensitive, the actual payment is less so. Paypal doesn't need to be up for you to win an acution just to complete the payment which is a separate action and you usually have a health window of a few days to get that in.
Was caught out by this myself - right in the middle of a transaction. The result was my card was charged but the order didn't go through to the merchant. Fortunately, the merchant was able to refund me, following a phone call this morning.
But really, PayPal need to do better than this.
May be a coincidence but I used Paypal last night, this morning I get a call from MBNA to say I have used the card somewhere that has had a security breach and they are issuing new cards, say we will need to update our account details with the new card and specifically mention Paypal.
Coincidence?
99% of the items I look at offer only Paypal for payment.
I don't have a paypal account. I don't want one. There is nothing I want badly enough that will change my mind. I guess I just won't buy anything on eBay ever again. Does eBay care? Are they even listening?
WRT "shame there isn't an alternative" I gather this depends on how you define alternative. Certainly there are other on-line auction sites, but the selection is the pits. I suppose that's what you really mean by no alternative
They have got greedy and can't even offer the service.
Listing fees then final sellers fees and then PayPal fees, all going to the same company! I recently sold a camera and ended up paying eBay/PayPal 18% of the value. For what? They don't offer traditional auction house guarantees. Outrageous. Last time I sell anything on eBay.
Vote with your feet I say.
We used to offer our customers the choice of SagePay (Protx as it was known then) and PayPal but after several IPN related screwups from PayPal that effectively meant PayPal charged our members but then never informed us of the orders completing, we dumped them.
Using SagePay solely now and its a far nicer system to use. Its been a year since we dropped PayPal and not one of our 60k+ members have complained its not an option for them anymore...
Really, I can't. I'm constantly getting notices that my account has been suspended, or that there has been suspicious activity detected, or something, and then requesting me to sign on and check out my account.
Funny thing is, I don't have either a PayPal account or an eBay account. I've never trusted PayPal, which has a healthy history of screwing over its customers, so when eBay made PayPal quasi-mandatory, I decided never to use eBay either.
Stories like this one are not going to help me change my mind either.
Quote Dunncha, "Considering that nobody uses eBay anymore.
Fail! Because eBay used to be fun!"
Nobody uses it really? I think you better open your eyes, if you have any! There's several billion, if not trillion users. In the words of Niko Bellic, GTA IV, Liberty City's famous Serbian terrorist, "Open your stupid eyes!"
I use it, and have never had any problems with either eBay or Paypal, other than fees. System outages happen, why people like the Reg like to make a song and dance is beyond me.
Typical media.... You're all the same!
Actually I am also an eBay and Paypal user, have been for years, but all because I add to the user base statistics of both, doesn't mean I now use eBay or Paypal. I suspect that there is a large percentage of users (statistically) who have had similar fraud experiences or resent the continuous increased charges and just never used their account again. Certainly there are some people who still use them, what a shame.
Its not just the media, go to almost any web site that has comments after an eBay / Paypal article and you see unhappy users who have fallen to fraud or the like.
They lost me as a customers when an item I was selling was paid for with stolen eBay/Paypal account credentials, but somehow I had to take the fall for someone else's inability to not securing their passwords correctly. I will never forgive eBay/Paypal for this.
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