New Paypal Policy - Anyone else seen this?

[Tom McClelland]

We operate a "Buy Now" button that accepts payments on Paypal's website either by credit card or Paypal account. Usually we neither know nor care which method gets used.

Starting about a month ago our clients keep getting their attempts to pay rejected, with the message "Guest User Access Expired". This appears to relate to people who try to pay by credit card, who have done so before. It looks as if Paypal has just started applying a limit to the number of times that you can do this before the buyer is forced to acquire a Paypal account (which they may not want to do).

Has anyone else seen this, or heard of it? Paypal's virtue is that they're easy for us to deal with as vendors. But we need them to act as CC processors, and not start a process where they insist that buyers set up Paypal accounts, or probably we'll have to start processing with someone else. That would be a pity, because despite their reputation in some quarters we've found them a pleasure to deal with.

 

[sysops]

Has anyone else seen this, or heard of it? Paypal's virtue is that they're easy for us to deal with as vendors. But we need them to act as CC processors, and not start a process where they insist that buyers set up Paypal accounts, or probably we'll have to start processing with someone else. That would be a pity, because despite their reputation in some quarters we've found them a pleasure to deal with.

Tom, you have just been lucky so far, that's all. Everyone starts off in the same boat, you use PayPal, and think "well, this isn't so bad, it works well, I don't know why everyone complains about PayPal so much".

It's easy to assume that all the people who have had problems with PayPal must have either been doing something dodgy, or were bad at communicating. While this is true in some cases, it isn't in all.

When you have a serious problem, and realise that there just isn't a way of resolving it, you will understand why PayPal are not a sensible business solution.

Why have you not looked at a PSP+Merchant Account solution?

 

[Tom McClelland]

Tom, you have just been lucky so far, that's all. Everyone starts off in the same boat, you use PayPal, and think "well, this isn't so bad, it works well, I don't know why everyone complains about PayPal so much".

It's easy to assume that all the people who have had problems with PayPal must have either been doing something dodgy, or were bad at communicating. While this is true in some cases, it isn't in all.

When you have a serious problem, and realise that there just isn't a way of resolving it, you will understand why PayPal are not a sensible business solution.

Why have you not looked at a PSP+Merchant Account solution?

Maybe we've been lucky, but I've spoken to a few other people who feel lucky too... In the last 3 years we've put hundreds of thousands of pounds of business through them, and these few transactions, in the last month, are the first significant problem that we've had. This particular requirement that is hitting us, for repeat buyers to create a Paypal account does seem like a new policy, but I'm slightly baffled that there isn't more of a fuss on the internet about it and I'm still wondering if it may not be a glitch that will go away soon.

The reason why I haven't looked at another solution (until now, maybe) is because everything has gone so well. The Paypal rake-off may be a little higher than a proper merchant solution, but I have to set that against a lot of other sunk costs of making a change, such as recoding all the stuff on our website that automatically issues licences to our clients when we make a sale. That code is all working beautifully and very simply with Paypal's IPN system. And I have to take note of my factual experience that when I have had to discuss account issues with Paypal so far the level of professionalism and timeliness in the responses from them has been absolutely exemplary.

 

[MH1]

Try ringing paypal, always found them very helpful myself, they might be able too explain the problem or a soloution.

 

[Faevilangel]

What account do you have? As the personal account has a limit of 3 credit card purchases per annum, you need to go up to business or pro (i think) to get unlimited card transactions

 

[Tom McClelland]

I've given them a call. The UK support team person that I got claimed to never have heard of this policy. Meanwhile the international business support team that I've communicated with via email claims (almost certainly completely wrongly, in my opinon) that the policy is not new and that the national support people *should* be able to tell me the limits and rules.

Regarding the question about number of uses/value limit. I haven't yet found out what the facts are. But it *isn't* uses on our site that count, because we've had at least 2 first time purchasors report the problem to us. One person who reported the problem claimed that it was the first time that they'd ever used a new credit card, which makes me wonder if the whole thing is a bug.

 

[Tom McClelland]

What account do you have? As the personal account has a limit of 3 credit card purchases per annum, you need to go up to business or pro (i think) to get unlimited card transactions

We have a business account, and until a few weeks ago we were processing hundreds of card sales a month without incident. This appears to be some kind of new limit that applies to buyers, not vendors.

 

[FreelanceSoftwareDeveloper]

Raise a support ticket, questioning it as an error and see what response they give.

www.paypal.com/mts

 

[Tom McClelland]

Raise a support ticket, questioning it as an error and see what response they give.

www.paypal.com/mts

That's what I've done:

Their response:

The seventh reply in the forum thread explains about the sending limit on live transactions and that customer support can assist you with specific questions about (such as what the limits are).

I'm not certain why the Customer Support team told you to contact us about this, we assist with integrating your website with the PayPal product not with any sending limit questions.

It isn't a new rule within PayPal. There's always been a limit to how much money you can send through the credit card form on Website Payments Standard. For instance, if a customer tries to make a purchase for over a $1000 with a credit / debit card, they will get an alert saying that the card cannot be used to make this payment, similar to the alert you mentioned in your initial question.

I disagree sharply with their statement that this behaviour isn't new. It seems to be new and very different to what we've seen before, but I haven't yet had time to take it up with them. I guess I'm kind of hoping that in the background they've spotted the bug and the issue has gone away.

 

[Tom McClelland]

Well, in the last week or so we haven't had a single potential buyer ring us up to report this problem, so I'm wondering if it was a bug that has now been fixed, or an incorrect internal setting on our Paypal account that PP have fixed at their end. I'll keep you posted if it happens again. (fingers crossed)