My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service. | Hacker News Reader

My Recent Experience with PayPal Customer Service.

christianowens.com

114 pointschrowe27 comments

Try PayPal's Merchant Technical Support (https://ppmts.custhelp.com/app/ask - Mass Pay is under "API Products") The developer forums on x.com can sometimes be helpful as well. They have a few staff members that work the boards.

If you're a developer, you don't really want to use their front line Customer Service.

It also helps to have an account manager but how you get one is a mystery. They called us up one day and said, Hi! I'm your new account manager.

Either their staff are lying to their customers in an obvious manner (not a good idea) or their internal documentation lies to their ignorant staff (not a good idea).

Either way around this is pretty much a perfect example of awful customer service.

Also, an example of the complete lack of manners. I don't know if I'm getting more sensitive to that kind of treatment or people are actually getting more aggressive, unsympathetic and losing their manners.

This is not about PayPal, this is about people that can't be nice to each other, can't help nor will try to, that can't answer a phone call without provoking an argue for no reason at all.

I see some of that kind of manners here at HN too. This makes me really sad.

I don't know about this. I've called Paypal many times and even though they sometimes weren't very helpful, they were always friendly and very respectful. Intentionally or unintentionally, the poster probably transcribed a phone call in a way that made the representative seem more blunt. I doubt it was transcribed word-for-word.

This is still ridiculous on Paypal's part, though. Good customer service isn't all about friendliness and nice words like "thanks for calling". People would appreciate it far more if Paypal omitted the pleasantries and just solved their problems.

I've rang PayPal before and been treated like an idiot. I got a notification to call and was told that the manager in charge of that issue won't be back for a few days so call back them. A far cry from the 24/7 support a few companies are starting to implement.

You've just been lucky. I've called Paypal a few times, and had almost identical responses. The most reminiscent part: the rep says something ridiculous, so you try to appeal to their sense of absurdity by saying things like "so no one at the company at all knows about this?" and then they give you a dumb response like "that's right".

I get worried the more I read about PayPal recently. I have had no immediate problems with PayPal before but I am worried it's more a matter of "When" I get issues and not "If".

This whole conversation is very worrying in particular, can they really be that stupid and un-interested?

Agreed. Even the most basic, low-level customer service employee should have an idea of the available products. Or even a searchable knowledge base, the lack of effort/care for something as serious as handling money (especially on the scale of PayPal's millions of daily transactions) is frightening.

Agreed, for the last while we have been instructing clients away from Paypal.

The problem is that only companies dealing with them on a merchant level really feel what PayPal is like. From a customer point of view it's a minority who experience problems (from what I read).

So that leaves you in a dilemma, users like using PayPal because it's quick and easy so from a company point of view, you have to offer it as a payment option. It's a massive catch 22.

We saw conversions go literally up 50% when we introduced PayPal as an option for payment on one site so it's really hard to make a stand against it.

Given the number of stories and PayPal's 100M active users, even the merchant complaints are (an extreme) minority of people who have issues. It comes down to PayPal caring more about buyers and big merchants than little merchants.

(Disclaimer: I work for another part of eBay.)

PayPal is run by imbeciles. I was once scammed on eBay by a buyer who received my item, then returned a broken identical one, notifying PayPal that I scammed him. Without even looking at my sales record or waiting for my response, they took the money out of my account and closed the issue.

After a month and a half of fighting on the phone with people who can't comprehend basic logic, getting an affidavit notarized, AND submitting photo evidence of the switch: I was only awarded 80% of the original amount.

The buyer was allowed to continue using eBay and PayPal to scam people, and I got negative feedback.

From this experience and the countless others posted to blogs every day, it's astonishing people still use the service.

Boycott PayPal!

Actually, as soon as the seller as a decent amount of feedback, I switch to wire transfers, if available. Why should I make an hardworking person pay to get paid?

Truth is: PayPal is too big to care about the little guy.

I was struggling with the same issues in December and I got no response when I posted questions to the official PayPal developer forums. I finally posted the question "Has this forum been abandoned?" It took them 3 days to respond, simply to say the forums had not been abandoned. My original set of questions went a week without an answer. Look here:

https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/forums/paypal-developers...

When they finally answered, this was their response:

------------------

Sorry for the delay. The reason why you are getting this error is because your PayPal account is not setup to use MassPay API. MassPay API is currently not available on accounts by default. You will need to contact customer support at the numbers below and request for your account to be reviewed and approved to use MassPay API. Thanks. US/CA: 1-888-221-1161 UK: 08707 307 191 Australia: 1-800-073-263 Germany: 0180 500 66 27 Other: 1-402-935-2080

-------------------

I called and got no useful help (my experience was like that of the OP).

My recent experience with PayPal Custom Service: I got a large payment via Square right away into my account from a client (first payment ever on a new PP account). So... Couple days later customer rep called me, asked about the transaction, if I would be receiving the same kinds regularly, confirmed a couple details about me and then ended the call. Few days later got an email saying my account has been unlocked and the money was now avail.

Seemed all perfectly reasonable.

Anecdotal evidence is anecdotal.

You forgot the part where, when you were visiting Eastern Europe, you accidentally logged back in to PayPal and they suspended your account and seized all the funds.

You forgot the part where someone logs into your account from Eastern Europe, drains it, then uses it to perform fraud transactions on eBay, and PayPal does nothing, so you take it to the internet for some payback.

PayPal can be harsh, I get that, but I also understand that:

1. They have 100 million active accounts which leaves even a small number of bad experiences turning into floods on the internet.

2. Being able to prevent fraud is 95% of the game in this business.

3. More than half of those bad experiences are downright un-true (leave out parts of story) and involve some type of shady operations by the user.

More than half of those bad experiences are downright un-true (leave out parts of story) and involve some type of shady operations by the user.

From what I've read, more than half of the Paypal "horror stories" involve people being completely truthful that they're doing something shady, and not understanding why Paypal is suspicious.

This is the Apple argument: But apple is so easy to use. And the counter side always says "but what you give up trumps any ease of use" at which point the person either gets it or keeps whining.

Stop using paypal, regardless of how good the features are.

Flat out denying the existence of a well-documented product feature? I'm curious how this will all turn out.

Not sure what you're expecting, it appears to have already "turned out" -- the OP cannot use the Mass Payment service because no one in PayPal will allow him to do so or even acknowledge it exists (unless you have an invite?). The CSRs refuse to escalate the issue so the OP can't talk to anyone else. His options appear to be to continue banging head against PayPal customer service in hopes that he gets the engineer that implemented "Mass Payments" or he can decide to use something else.

a quick google search turns up https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...

there is a "sign up" button on the bottom. i don't know how it can be claimed that is invite-only. maybe in the UK?

I know a lot of people tend to bitch about Paypal but I think it's important to remember that there are a ton of cases where the service is fantastic. I for one was on the phone with them last night to sort out an issue. The rep was very knowledgeable and helpful. Just saying keep it in perspective!

Honestly, is anyone surprised? PayPal is a very large service that does not need to differentiate itself from its competitors with superior customer service. Clueless CS reps are par for the course in situations like these.

Similar experience here. Previously I logged into my Paypal from overseas and was subsequently blocked. No message as to what happened or why I could not log in. I worked out that it was probably because of the sudden change of location. Tried for weeks on and off to reactivate the account, but was forced to coordinate for family members to send me additional personal documents since Paypal required more documentation than one needs to travel around the world. Calls to customer service were answered in condescending voice, and worded in a way to make it sound like "my problem", and nothing helpful came from the calls except the same information found on the website.

I had the same problem with MassPay too. I got a customer service rep immediately who told me that you had to call in to enable it due to fraud and incorrectly configured SaaS payment apps. It did take like 2-3 hours to enable it because I guess it was slow that day or something. (The rep was audibly frustrated at the unusual slowness and random errors that day.)

It's obvious: PayPal is run by robots.

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