Please wake me up from this PayPal nightmare

[gravyface]

PayPal has been horrendous. I can only imagine how bad it would've been doing this from scratch without the official IPN 1.4 module.

 

My biggest beef is with PayPal "getting in the way" of the entire shopping experience with its incessant "sign up for a PayPal account!" badgering and tiny URLs, purposely created to make it difficult for non-PayPal customers. The clincher is the "Auto Return" functionality: the most important step in the process, the one that brings your customer back to your site automatically, does work unless the user has signed up for a PayPal account. *

 

Instead, they give you this tiny, obscure, "continue to your order confirmation" URL that will probably not get clicked -- apparently the IPN osCommerce team had to work in some sort of "pre-order" klugery to compensate for this. I can only imagine how the irritating sandbox glitches and errors would have added to the joys of their experience.

 

Bottom line, my store "works" but its just so embarassingly clumsy, I'll probably lose more money fielding complaint calls than I gain through sales. Its just not professional IMO.

 

</rant>

 

Anyone else feel this way? What have you done about it? Are you using another gateway? I'll admit, the PayPal "brand" is appealing -- they're clearly the online leaders in this stuff (why I have no idea) and I like the "per-transaction" fees instead of monthly/annual subscriptions. I was considering the WebPayments Pro option (user never sees the PayPal site) but apparently its "US Only", and I'm in Canada, so that's not an option.

 

* I've tried setting this in the Profile > Preferences and tried passing it as a IPN variable; it did not work. I did some research and found a post on the PDNcommunity forums where a moderator confirmed that AutoRun will not work unless a user is signed up for PayPal. If you've been able to get this work, I'm all ears.

[dynamoeffects]

You're right, it's not professional. The only option is to upgrade to a real merchant account and payment gateway. The increase in sales will more than likely cover the additional fees.

 

It wouldn't be so bad if they replaced the IPN service with Express Checkout, but for someone refuse to do so.

Edited November 23, 2006 by dynamoeffects

[hypersmith]

Hi Gravyface,

 

Am new to it all and am in the final stages of launching a store. Am using PayPal and have easily installed PayPal IPN. Though with this method and the conventional version of PayPal when i engage the confirmation and the Paypal site loads the amount to be charged does not appear on the paypal site. Does the customer need to enter this amount or am I missing an important step / attribute somewhere?

 

After this problem is solved, then perhaps i can join you in your PayPal rant ;-)

 

Thanks for any advice you -- or anyone else can offer.

 

Cheers,

[gravyface]

Hi Gravyface,

 

Am new to it all and am in the final stages of launching a store. Am using PayPal and have easily installed PayPal IPN. Though with this method and the conventional version of PayPal when i engage the confirmation and the Paypal site loads the amount to be charged does not appear on the paypal site. Does the customer need to enter this amount or am I missing an important step / attribute somewhere?

 

After this problem is solved, then perhaps i can join you in your PayPal rant ;-)

 

Thanks for any advice you -- or anyone else can offer.

 

Cheers,

 

out-of-the-box, so to speak, the IPN 1.4 module passed along the total to PayPal; I had to fiddle with taxes a bit and I added a contribution that passes the billing information along to PayPal for non-PayPal customers, but other than that, it worked flawlessly. I'd hop on the "official IPN PayPal contribution" thread for support.

[hypersmith]

out-of-the-box, so to speak, the IPN 1.4 module passed along the total to PayPal; I had to fiddle with taxes a bit and I added a contribution that passes the billing information along to PayPal for non-PayPal customers, but other than that, it worked flawlessly. I'd hop on the "official IPN PayPal contribution" thread for support.

 

Beautiful. Thank you so much for your quick reply.

-j-