A Tale of PayPal woes

PayPal you owe our family $4020.

That figures represents the amount of extra money my wife and I had to shell out last week for tickets to an upcoming party because of the company’s inability to give us access to our accounts in a timely manner.

My wife and I lost out on the opportunity to buy two $20 tickets to the forthcoming HoHoTO food bank fundraiser because we weren’t able to access payment information we had already submitted. (The party’s taking place at the Mod Club in Toronto on the 16th by the way). The online payment mechanism wouldn’t let my wife and I buy the tickets for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to us. In both instances, the issue wasn’t clear from the get go nor were customer service representatives able to assess and explain the issue to us quickly.

This much i know – the system wouldn’t allow me to see or choose an active Visa card I’ve had on file with PayPal for years. It wasn’t listed as my primary card nor was I able to switch to it from an expired Mastercard PayPal had on file. Why? I’m still not entirely sure.

By the time we sorted out our problems, the party organizers were out of the lowest-cost tier of tickets – there was a limited number made available to the public. As a result, we had to pay an extra $10 a pop for each ticket to the gathering of social media enthusiasts.

Calls to customer service revealed little information of use. I was on the phone for 15 minutes during which time I managed to solve the problem in a circuitous manner.

By the time my issue was resolved – my wife’s account is still in limbo – the cheapest tickets were gone.

We had to buy $30 tickets instead. Petty? Perhaps somewhat. An extra $20 isn’t going to make or break us.

Problem is we’ll likely run into PayPal problems again if history repeats itself. There’s a good chance that’ll happen – this isn’t the first incident I’ve had with PayPal. The system has frustrated me with its user unfriendly ways for on several occasions. The issues are typically the speed of the transaction and access to information. Yet it’s increasingly difficult to avoid it – I expect to use it more in future. A growing number of merchants with an interest in e-commerce in my anecdotal experience seem to use it.

HoHoTO is no different. The party organizers chose PayPal as the online payment mechanism partygoers more or less have to use if they’d like to buy a ticket to the party (which will be a whole lot of fun.)

Time to clean up your act PayPal – everyone will be happier and you’ll be richer for it.