Make Sure Your Business Is Flexible - A Bad Paypal Experience |
Many of you probably use the popular online wallet paypal to send money online and to accept credit card payments, etc. on your website. However, if you haven’t experienced it already, paypal probably has one of the most ridicoulous customer service that you could find anywhere.
Here’s a first hand experience that has been repeated quite a few times. This, by the way, is a great way to lose a nice big number of customers (or at least want to make them leave).
As you may or may not know, paypal has a $500 limit on withdrawls until you can verify your identity, which is great and all fine and dandy. They do require 2/3 forms of identification currently - either your social security #, your bank account verfied, or your credit card verified. Of course, being a business, we have no social security #, but a EIN #, which paypal doesn’t take. That leaves us to the bank account and credit card options. Bank account wise, it was no problem, we got that verified right away. However, credit card verification wise, the system didn’t allow us to do it!
So of course, being a business that transacts 5 digits per month through paypal, we call their priority customer service #, which (it’d be a damn concidence!) sounds just like the normal #. Wow, selected # of customers get this “awesome” service? Yeah, great. After that you’re greeted by a series of random stuff you have to pick from, like “My Account”, “Transactions”, etc. Like how the hell am I supposed to know what falls under “My Account” and why do I give a crap?
After screaming “Operator” into the phone for about 4 minutes and having the automated system tell me a few times “Your query is not recognized”, it finally starts ringing, ringing, ringing… only to be answered by an answering machine telling me that the wait time is over 5 minutes. Gee, that’s nice to know.
20 minutes later, some lady with a really thick accent picks up and asks me what the problem is. After a long and patient explanation, she finally understood the problem, and gave me her amazing solution: “Sorry sir, that’s just the way the system works. You either have to enter your social security (which we don’t have, duh) # or your visa credit card #(which doesn’t work. If visa doesn’t work, you can try a mastercard or discover card”. Uh, right. I’m suppose to have one of those handy just so I can take out the $5k in the account?
So, being kind of irritated, I asked to be transferred to a supervisor. Again, a nice 20 minute wait. Yeah, that’ll really make your customers happy. Again, the same schpiel.
You know, if you want businesses to process transactions at your place, how about making it easy to actually get paid? How do you have a friggen bug in your system that prevents businesses from being able to withdraw their funds when they have all the information you need, and then tell them that’s the way it is when they call?
Yeah, so taking out the $50k paypal account account at $500/month… whoopie doo, $49,500 to go!