Members Login
Username 
 
Password 
    Remember Me  
Post Info TOPIC: PayPal outage leads to concern, frustration


Top Poster

Status: Offline
Posts: 3757
Date:
PayPal outage leads to concern, frustration


PayPal outage leads to concern, frustration

By Juan Carlos Perez
November 3, 2010 06:06 PM ET

IDG News Service - When networking hardware failed at PayPal on Friday morning and its recovery systems lagged in responding, things got hectic at Shop By System, an online seller of computer accessories and components based in South Dakota.

With PayPal's online payment service down for hours globally on Friday, Shop By System staff had to scramble to deal with a sudden spike in customer service calls from buyers inquiring about orders that had timed out or been outright rejected.

While the employees tried to complete as many orders as possible via phone, Shop By System estimates that PayPal's outage resulted in a loss of between 25 percent and 30 percent of the day's potential sales.

Shop By System, a PayPal merchant for more than two years, is now considering adding other e-payment options to its online store.

"I would give them good marks overall, however when they go down it would seem they really go down, and it's typically for several hours," said Tony Maibaum, Shop By System manager, via e-mail.

In his company's experience, calling the PayPal merchant support line is of little to no help. He thinks PayPal could do a much better job reaching out to merchants when it has technical problems.

"We've never received an e-mail stating their service is down nor have we ever received an e-mail apologizing that their service was down," he said.

On Friday, he found PayPal to be slow and vague in its blog updates about the outage, which made it more difficult for Shop By System to manage the situation with its customers.

"We had previously featured Google Checkout as an option for our customers and Checkout by Amazon has been getting a lot of support lately, too. Our current thinking is to explore adding back in at least an additional checkout option for our customers as both a courtesy and a backup should another outage occur," he said.

On the PayPal blog and discussion forums, other merchants expressed similar concerns during the outage, complaining about lost sales, upset customers, unhelpful PayPal help desk staffers and spotty updates.

"Are you going to provide any more details, or is it just a case of telling all your merchants that 'something broke,' which we already knew," wrote one merchant identified as Edward.

"Triple redundancy is the only solution to this unacceptable outage," wrote another named Tom.

With the holiday shopping season approaching, online retailers can take steps to mitigate problems with third-party providers of online payments and other critical functionality for their e-stores.

It's a good idea for e-tailers to have alternative payment options in case the primary one malfunctions, said Ben Rushlo, director of performance management at Keynote Systems, a mobile and website testing and monitoring company in San Mateo.

read the rest



__________________

Exposing the sleazery of ebaY and PayPal

 



Top Poster

Status: Offline
Posts: 3757
Date:

Looks like it was actually 2 outages

PayPal services crash for two hours

The payment service used its blog and updates to keep e-retailers up to date.

PayPal Inc. services went down for about two hours in two separate instances last Friday, a spokesman for the payment processor says. PayPal could not process payments for online shoppers around the world that wanted to pay with PayPal during that time. PayPal.com remained live, although customers who logged in could not complete transactions.

(continues...)

__________________

Exposing the sleazery of ebaY and PayPal

 



Top Poster

Status: Offline
Posts: 3757
Date:

PayPal network problems worsen


By Alex Kayle, Senior portals journalist

Johannesburg, 8 Nov 2010

PayPal's recent outage was the result of a network hardware failure, and the problem worsened when the failover systems didn't spring into action as designed, reports Fierce CIO.

continues...

__________________

Exposing the sleazery of ebaY and PayPal

 

Page 1 of 1  sorted by
Quick Reply

Please log in to post quick replies.

Tweet this page Post to Digg Post to Del.icio.us


Create your own FREE Forum
Report Abuse
Powered by ActiveBoard