A serious glitch in PayPal’s payment verification system last Thursday (15th May 2008) created havoc on ecommerce sites that depend on the service. For more than 48 hours, the bug in PayPal’s instant payment notification has made it impossible for them to process orders. It also meant that credit card holders who placed orders were billed even though they are unable to take delivery of the goods or services they’ve just purchased!
To make things even worse the customer knew nothing about this, so ordered and paid and then didn’t get the goods they ordered making it look like the store was scamming them.
PayPal was painfully slow to even acknowledge the problem. The company didn’t inform users of the glitch until Friday afternoon, more than 24 hours after complaints began rolling in.
In usual Paypal nonspeak a spokeswoman Amanda Pires said that a “percentage of merchants a percentage of the time” don’t receive an IPN. “We are looking at this as a high priority fix,” she said. “We’ve been working around the clock. We’re hoping to have a fix as soon as possible.”
When asked to estimate that percentage of customers or the percentage of times they receive failures, Pires said it’s “much less than the majority of the time.”
www.LaunchWorkshop.com recommends a variety of payment solutions – a number of which are far more efficient and more open then the overly secretive Paypal.
Goto www.website.launchworkshop.com to find out how to get on Page 1 of Google.
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