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Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

PayPal's redesigned their UI two or three times in the past decade or so. None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet. I still log in and see the same site I did in the early 2000s. I really, really understand that their business is enormously complex, operating in hundreds of different markets, but... you'd think some of the improvements would trickle down eventually. It's a real challenge for their support staff that has to figure out which of several completely different interfaces a customer is seeing before they can provide any help with it.

http://i.imgur.com/a1pYK8a.png

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They do a lot of things with business accounts that is irritating. For example:

- they should be able to remove the annoying "USE PAYPAL CREDIT FOR THIS??!?!?!?!?!" overlay.

- show transaction ids on the payment confirmation page, rather than making us navigate to a 2 more pages after paying

Oh, and not sure if this is related to just business accounts, but I have to log in twice to get logged in. Some kind of cookie bug that's fixed exactly once if I clear cookies, then starts happening again.

And, lastly, since I see you have a few disputes/chargebacks...their chargeback handling process is horrid.

> I have to log in twice to get logged in.

I've had to log in twice for months as well. I can't comprehend their leaving something so basic broken this long.

> And, lastly, since I see you have a few disputes/chargebacks...their chargeback handling process is horrid.

I have no beef with their chargeback handling myself. It's something more ridiculous actually. Those 5 "open cases" are cases I opened against a hosting company 12 years ago, in 2004. They stopped paying their colo bills and the DC cut power to their racks, including all the servers they rented to customers. PayPal decided the best course of action, given no money in their account or linked bank accounts to pay any refunds, was to leave the disputes open forever.

I can't even view the cases any more. If I try to search that far back in time, the dispute search times out and the site dies with no response (white screen), like some overloaded WordPress blog on shared hosting.

Have you ever worked that has technology lasting more than ten years?

There is probably a backlog of 1,000 bugs that all of the developers would love to fix, but they're nasty edge cases in legacy code and would require a major refactor and we have plans on building a full replacement, but product has this new initiative first and...

The "you have to log in twice" thing though?

https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business/I-m-being...

It's not an edge case.

What helps is to bookmark a page that's not the slow loading "Overview" page that is the top of their navigation hierarchy, and jump there directly. You still need to log in twice sometimes, but at least it loads much faster. But it's pretty outrageous that such hacks are even necessary.

(this one loads quickest, in my experience: https://history.paypal.com/?cmd=_history-search)

PayPal won a lot of praise a couple of years ago for rewriting their code in Node.js and the phenomenal productivity improvements that supposedly brought.

I wonder if the complaints we see on this thread mean the honeymoon between PayPal and node.js is over.

If I remember the discussion correctly, it seemed to center on the node code still being very slow despite being faster than the java system it replaced. People commented that the increase in speed may of simply been due to the act of rewriting the system and not being tied down by in house framework rather than any favorable property of node.js

I don't see why you would expect node.js to be faster than anything else; despite all the time that's been poured into it I'd think JavaScript is still inherently difficult to optimize (and I'd guess they also need to do a lot of extra work to deal with numbers in the proper precision since they are handling money).

The thing that worries me is the scale of their attack surface, they have so many different systems inter operating there re bound to be some serious security bugs in there too.

    > I can't comprehend their
    > leaving something so basic
    > broken this long.

Hipmunk have been showing economy fares for business searches for weeks, and fixing it is apparently on their backlog, but not very high up. It's made their site completely useless, and their fare alerts pointless.

Do companies just get complacent, or fire off everything but a skeleton staff to keep servers running after they've got an MVP?

The thing is, PayPal code is a mess. And it is a mess that responds well to resources being thrown at it. For as long as PayPal keeps seeing growth, nobody wants to fix that mess.

Internally it really works like a bank - there are a couple of dev teams that are always under time crunch and rest of the company is basically busy politicking over the pie.

And when that growth stops, it's too late to fix the problems. If you can keep things teetering along for a couple more years you can get a few bonuses cash out and leave before it all falls over.

It's the same story everywhere. I wish that it weren't.

Yes but when would _that_ happen? Growth will slow down when: 1) Either they have captured almost all of the market 2) Or they have a better competitor which washes them away

Iff (1) happens, they will not go under as they will a 'large' bank and will most likely be 'too big to fail'.

And I don't think (2) is happening fast enough.

2) I imagine this is what the politicking people are supposed to work on to gain an interest in the competition.

Like a bank :)

When your code is so brittle that you can't widen your target audience, you can't keep growing.

And it's not like there aren't plenty of examples of products that have enough competition that they grow the market but never saturate it.

Hm, that's odd. I have a Paypal business account and I've been seeing the new layout for at least a year now.

Are you using PayPal pro? I'm not, since AFAIK the only difference is the website redirect + accepting the full credit card information.

You can take payments in person without having a Paypal Pro account, just their swiper reader.

There is definitely a split, one of our newer accounts has a new interface but the older ones don't. Not sure if it is age or location causing it.

World's slowest staged rollout, perhaps?

None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet.

Tarsnap got the latest updated interface a few months ago. Maybe they're rolling it out to non-US businesses first?

>None of those redesigns have made it to business accounts yet.

We get sort of half old, half new, depending on where you click. Neither interfaces are any good though.

It depends on where you are, and for some countries only certain % of the population will get it as it ramps up slowly. For some products, the new isn't ready so it falls back to the old stack. It could be due to the ramp, WIP, or just that the old code is too old to the extent no one wants/dares to modify it.

They keep upgrading my business account to use the new version and I invariably have to switch it back after a couple of days because it's missing (or I can't easily find) various features that I rely upon.

I'm very grateful that unlike some other services they at least give me the option to keep switching back to the 'classic' view.

This reminds me of a React/Flux talk by Facebook's Jing Chen about how there were pieces of code within the product that literally nobody wanted to touch because they were so fragile and complex. I suspect there is something similarly messy in the PayPal business accounts, and for whatever reason a ground-up rewrite was also a challenge.

My biggest pain: It is 2016 but we still have to log into PayPal to cancel subscriptions manually when someone requests to downgrade their account. API does not support it because our subscription numbers start with "S-" which seems to happen with old PayPal accounts.

Couldn't you automate it anyway?

Mechanize and PhantomJS can be really helpful to script things that aren't covered by a public API.

The staged rollout has been ridiculously slow. I had it on my business account before my personal one, well over a year ago I think. The biggest problem was that it was activated before all of the features were available, so either it would throw you back into an old-site page when you clicked on something, or you'd need to manually switch to the old design to find a certain tool or setting that wasn't yet exposed in the new site. As of the last month or so it looks finally like they've gotten all of the features I use onto the new site, and it definitely better than the early-noughties design of the old site.

I see that same UI on a normal user account.

Maybe the fact that I'm in Argentina is somehow related? (we have some additional restrictions due to government restrictions, so the functionality is different too).

You can call them and ask them to upgrade your profile. I was seeing this UI until I requested they upgrade me a few months ago.

Tangentally, does anyone know how to show a running balance in PayPal, similar to a bank statement. I can get a list of transactions, but there doesn't seem to be a 'Balance' column, and it's not obvious which transactions affect the balance.

Switch back to the 'classic' view. That's the only way I could find to do it.

I thought there was a balance option on that same table.

Edit: Link on mine is: All Activity (with balance)

No. You'd have to roll your own using nvp TransactionSearch api with BalanceAffecting transaction. Also you'd have to do currency conversions on your own

Continues to use the VeriSign logo (discontinued 2 years ago)

Not to mention that all FAQs have been updated to NEW UIs.

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