19 April, 2011

Why did we blacklist PayPal?

We've used PayPal now for several years to send/receive payments, but now we've decided to blacklist them as a route for making payments to vendors and receiving payments. The triggering issue was relatively minor, but what has convinced us that PayPal could be bad for our reputation is the way they've handled our subsequent queries.

After years of payments by us to suppliers being handled smoothly by PayPal, they suddenly decided to delay settlement of an invoice by several days. There is no apparent reason for the delay and the PayPal Help Desk seem at a loss to explain the actual reason for the delay. We have no shortage of funding and we also have lodged details of a credit card as a backup payment method on their system.

Our impression is that the PayPal Help Desk cannot be bothered to investigate the issue thoroughly and cannot be bothered to remediate the situation. Our guess is the Ebay owners of PayPal are unconcerned if individuals receive a poor service so long as the customer churn rate does not exceed a certain percentage figure. If that would increase their marketing costs for PayPal they would then take notice.

We have made three separate written requests that the Paypal Help Desk team escalate the matter to their senior management for a faster resolution. Each of those requests have been ignored. It seems the ethos of the PayPal Help Desk is to respond to fault tickets but not to answer the questions or to provide a solution. No doubt this makes their response statistics look good to management but it does not deal with legitimate customer anger at the failure of their system. So far as we are concerned the supplier will have been left with the clear impression that our company has a poor credit history/rating. It is damaging to our reputation.

We warned PayPal we would blacklist them if they did not become more helpful but that has been ignored too. Well now we've blacklisted them and closed the standing orders we were paying via PayPal.

The particular transaction in question was for a piece of software to be used to promote an ecommerce site for one of our clients. We have demonstrated to that client that PayPal should not be used to collect payments for their services/goods. It is just not worth the heartache of arbitrarily delayed payments. Our client has opened contract negotiations with another credit card facility service provider. It will represent a substantial revenue loss to PalPal.

So far as we are concerned the senior managers of the PalPal Help Desk team are culpable in this loss of a customer. The managers set the ethos and procedures of their workers. Sadly with a quick search on Google we see many similar complaints about PayPal's attitude by other dissatisfied clients.

Meanwhile we are registering with Alertpay and MoneyBookers.

Oaksys


Edit
2nd Feb 2012: A recent development. 
17th Feb 2012 - Another screw up.

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