I've had very good and very bad telephone support experiences in the past, but this one was certainly one of the worst.
Over the last 2 weeks, I have tried to pay for 2 separate items on paypal from 2 independent (as far as i know) sellers. One was from an ebay seller and one was not. Let me first describe the problems I encountered trying to pay for each.
I tried to pay the eBay seller via eBay's paypal interface:
- At the review page, I click on the big orange Continue with PayPal button.
- This brings me to a page asking for my PayPal credentials. So far, so good. I enter my credentials and click on the Continue button.
- I am brought to a page titled Choose a payment method in which I am asked to enter my credit card information. I am not being asked if I want to withdraw from the credit cards or the bank accounts which are already linked to my PayPal account. Things are already starting to look suspicious. I decide to fill in my credit card information and click on Continue.
- I am now brought back to the same form, now unfilled, with a wonderful red error message: This credit card is already linked to your PayPal account. Please add a different card or go to the Profile tab and choose Add or Edit Credit Card to update your card information. Great.
It's not yet clear that this is a PayPal problem. It might be an eBay problem or something else for all I know. Luckily, PayPal also provides you with the ability to pay for eBay items from their website by going to the Pay for eBay Items sub-tab of the Send Money tab. The behaviour of this page has changed in the past few days
It used to do the following:
- Show the item that I wanted to pay for, which I could click on.
- Give me the error: You must add funds to your PayPal account before sending more money. It's true that I have no available funds on my PayPal account, but I was intending on using my credit card.
It now simply says "We did not find any items that require payment at this time." Although the item is still unpaid for.
For the non-eBay item, this is roughly what I had to do:
- Go to the Send Money Online tab and fill out the form, after which I click on Continue and am greeted by a familiar error message: You must add funds to your PayPal account before sending more money.
- I e-mail the seller about the problem. He kindly proposes to send a PayPal invoice.
- I receive an e-mail with an invoice at 19:51 with a link to send money with my phone... why with my phone?? The e-mail specifies that I can otherwise log in to PayPal to pay the invoice, which still doesn't work
- I receive a second e-mail regarding the invoice at 20:09. This time, I am given a Pay Now button that I can press. Unfortunately this still doesn't work and yields the same error.
- Finally, I receive a third e-mail at 19:11, the next day. This one also has a Pay Now button. I press it, and am brought to a page where I can finally pay for my item.
While trying to fix this problem, I called PayPal customer service a few times and must have spoken to at least 6 people. They all gave me different excuses as to why my account was not working how I wanted it to. Here are some of the things they told me (paraphrasing from memory):
- "Maybe you should try clearing your browser cache or using a different browser."
This seems like a reasonable suggestion, but I had already done that before calling.
- "It's because you usually use your account in Canada, and you are currently trying to use it in France. Our fraud team has flagged this as suspicious activity. I can't really help you. I suggest you create a paypal.fr account, remove your credit card from your old account and add it to your new one."
Seriously!? - "The system is telling me that it's because the sellers' paypal accounts are not set up to accept USD."
Really? Two independent sellers in the United States don't want to get their money in USD? I did end up asking the sellers if their accounts were accepting USD because I could not rule out the possibility, but this really did not seem like a plausible cause. - "It's because we're working on new awesome features of PayPal which we are about to roll out at the beginning of next month!"
I don't care about your awesome new features. I just want to be able to send money now. - "It's because your credit card shows up as unconfirmed. I have sent a confirmation request for your credit card. You will be receiving a minor charge on your credit card and you will have to log in to PayPal and input the amount of that charge. It should happen in the next couple days."
My credit card does not show up as unconfirmed on my side of things. Also, it has been 2 days now, and I still haven't received an e-mail about that confirmation request or gotten any charge on my credit card.
Although the non-eBay item has now been paid for, I still have not paid for the eBay item. I guess I will have to call PayPal again. Does anyone have good experiences talking to them? Do you have any tips? Is there a secret phrase that I can use to talk to someone competent?
edit: I had forgotten about it at the time of writing, but thanks to Sophia for pointing out a relevant xkcd comic.
