PayPal Oddities
 

- Within the last few weeks all of the confirmation emails I've received from PayPal have been in Thai. My language preference still shows as English. I've had a Thai IP address for the last six years, but the Thai language emails just started recently.

- I tried to order an art print online from a site that processes all of it's payments through PayPal. The site definitely ships Internationally and even has a price list for International shipments. I started processing via PayPal which let me select International shipping to Thailand as an option. It even changed the shipping rate to the correct amount for International. But, when I went to enter the shipping address it refused to accept anything but a US address. And, it changed the shipping rate back to domestic and added sales tax. Gave up on ordering the print, but wrote the artist about the PayPal idiocy.

- I tried to send PayPal a message about this through their web-based contact system, but the page wouldn't fully load in either Safari 5.1 or Chrome 14.0.385.202. Worked fine with Firefox.

In response to my inquiry about the foreign order problem I received four rapid fire replies from PayPal, including this one:

Oops! Looks like someone forgot to fill in the blanks.

Here's the latest nonsense from PayPal:

On wonders what drug this person was on when they composed this reply which was clearly fabricated out of whole cloth.

I frequently purchase items on eBay and elsewhere, pay with PayPal and have the items shipped directly to me here in Thailand. In fact, this usually works very well and is quite economical. It astounds me that this PayPal rep asserts that it cannot be done. Amazing.

It is weird. My Paypal was registered in US. I have been living is EU for 10 years and have been able to use Paypal with ANY payments in US, EU, China, where ever.

It gets weirder. I sent the PayPal agent a screen shot of a recent transaction in which I used PayPal to pay for an item sent to my Thai address. It's right there in black and white: US PayPal account. Thailand shipping address.

Here's her reply:

She completely ignored the prima facie evidence and is sticking to her erroneous guns.

I use Paypal all the time. However I have no illusions about their customer support. Usually you get automated answer. If a person answers he does not try to understand the question if he reads it at all. Every followup will be by different person and you never know what is his native language. I had a fraud case where I did not get anywhere with 20 or so messages and gave up with 100USD loss. But, hey everybody uses Paypal in anyway - why bother with customer service.
I would open a new account and try then.

Which was sort of the point of this post.

I finally got email from someone who seemed to understand the situation. I re-presented all of the information, including the inconsistency of their web site: allowing me to select Thailand to calculate shipping costs but not letting me use a Thailand shipping address.

My hopes for resolution were dashed with her reply:

Thats cool! I got this very message 5 times when I had a go.

Must be their stock kiss-off message.

I've had enough bad experiences with PayPal now that if any other option is presented, that's what I'll choose.

I had the same feeling. But I use Paypal still just try not to need any customer service again. Also I would never trust their talk about security - you get no help with their solutions. But if you use credit card to pay through Paypal then banks can help you instead.
Overall out of about 1500 transactions over 10 years only 2-3 have been bad.

Smacks of a computer-generated reply.

Looks like Assistant will be better than that - I hope so anyway.

I think I finally understand this. If you have a US PayPal account you cannot ship non-eBay purchases to an International address. You can ship eBay purchases internationally.

So, I solved the problem by creating a new PayPal account using my Thai address. For an email address I just used @me.com instead of @mac.com. Worked fine.

It would be nice if this were explained more clearly. It would just take one sentence.

More Nonsense
 

About a month ago my daughter needed an emergency infusion of cash. (Believe me, it happens even after they're grown up.) So, I figured PayPal would be quick and cheap.

Unfortunately, my daughter's lame Dad sent the money to her "old" PayPal account instead of to the "new" PayPal account. Of course, daughter does not know the old password or any of the information that might be used to retrieve the information online.

I called PayPal and asked for the money back so I could send it to the correct account. Sorry, they just don't do this. So, I guess if you make a typo and send money to a wrong account you're SOL. Good reason not to use them.

My daughter called and they told her to fax (yes, fax) her driver's license and a utility bill so they could verify her identity and address. (Have they not heard of Photoshop?) She doesn't have a fax, so she scanned and emailed the stuff to me and I faxed it to PayPal (using PAM FAX). Within a few hours PayPal emailed my daughter confirming receipt of the requested documents and telling her that she would soon receive paper mail (yes, paper mail) with instructions on how to reset the password.

Two weeks passed and nothing. She called again. They told her that the utility bill was of insufficient legibility and to send something else. So, for two weeks they've been sitting on this without the courtesy of a phone call or email message telling her that one of the documents was unacceptable.

What lame idiots they are.

The Saga Continues
 

I "enhanced" the utility bill with Graphic Converter and faxed it to PayPal. I had my daughter call, again, to see if they got it and to see if it was legible enough.

The agent she spoke with told her they really didn't need her ID or the utility bill. He asked her a few questions, gave her a five digit code over the phone and she was instantly able to reset her password and access the account.

So, the last two weeks of waiting for PayPal to deal with the faxed ID and utility bill were a total waste of time. If only she'd been lucky enough to speak with the right person the first time.

What a company.

My experience exactly.

Whilst I accept that expats are a small % of the world's population, I was disappointed to find that one is unable to move overseas without creating a new Paypal account. That was then. I believe they have sorted that now.

eBay, however are a different story. My address is still

This Road
That Province
Thai postcode
UNITED KINGDOM.

In fairness to the international postal system, I have always received my purchases and in good time too.

Just had another:

I get billed for an eBay purchase that has no/free shipping (actually, it was a US iTunes Gift card) and Paypal would not "continue" without a "shipping amount".???

Seller, on request, generated a separate invoice, so no problem, albeit "in the end".

I'm sitting here grinning -- Having had most of these experiences at one time or another, I finally closed my account with PayPal last year and have never used it since. Somehow, the world continued to turn on its axis and several etail purchases using an ordinary credit card have worked without a problem.

Unfortunately, non-PayPal options are not always available; especially when you live in a place like Thailand where credit cards are disliked because of high merchant fees. Also, eBay turns out to be a huge boon because many of the merchants there will ship worldwide using ordinary mail making their prices very attractive. For example, I recently ordered a Broadcom video card for an AppleTV. Not available at all in Thailand. Normal US retailers want to ship via FedEx or DHL, which are outrageously expensive. The eBay merchant used International first class mail. The card got here in less than a week for only a buck for the shipping.

When I look at my PayPal history there is a bunch of junk like that plus some coffee beans I ordered from northern Thailand, a hotel deposit and the art work that I mentioned in the OP. In all of those cases PayPal was the only option offered.

PayPall is a necessary evil. Unfortunately, they seem to be by far the only non-direct credit card method of online payment these days. I have used ClickandBuy in the past but their customer service is not better, neither do they provide a decent account management as paypal does. sigh...

True, and I have run into that. I use the Fruux prefpane to sync my address book, calendars and bookmarks between my machines and it wants an annual fee paid via PayPal because they don't have a credit card account. I'm not sure how I'll deal with that when it comes up for renewal.

Only just noticed this..

"I finally closed my account with PayPal last year and have never used it since. "

Really? You have given me a McEnroe moment! ;-)

Doesn't PayPal have a "Guest Checkout" mode where you pay with a credit card without actually having a PayPal account?

Looking into it, I see that they do. Thanks.

PayPal is continuing to drive me nuts. All of a sudden, almost every payment I try to make using my bank account as a funding source is flagged as potentially fraudulent and they want me to instead fund with a credit card. Of course, this involves a fee.

Oddly, if I change the payment type from personal to commercial (to the same individual), it gladly accepts the bank as a funding source. Of course, this involves a fee charged to the recipient.

Seems to be a major "bait and switch" strategy on PayPal's part.

Today, PayPal rejected my Instapaper subscription renewal (funded by my bank account for a long time now) and wanted me to switch to funding with a credit card. More revenue generating bait and switch.

This is not my experience. Perhaps something else is going on?

I called them and spoke to them for a long time. They explained that they have complex fraud algorithms and once a transaction is flagged as potentially fraudulent there is nothing that PayPal staff can do about it. You can either cancel the transaction or select a different funding source. (Of course, that always means selecting a credit card which generates fees for them.)

What they couldn't explain was why sending money to my daughter as a "Personal" transaction is always flagged as fraudulent, while sending money to her as a "Purchase" is never flagged as fraudulent. Same PayPal account, same recipient email address, same recipient, same amount. The only difference is that a Personal transaction does not earn PayPal any fee while a Purchase generates income for them.

They refuse to discuss it any further or make an attempt to discover why this is happening. Apparently their fraud detection algorithms are in a big black box into which no one is allowed to peer.

What else could possibly be going on? If there is something wrong with my account, shouldn't they be anxious to figure out what it is? When I reminded them that they were losing money by not working with me on the problem they simply acknowledge that and refused further discussion.

And, yes, my bank account funding source has been "verified" for many years now. I've not had real fraudulent activity on my account and I've never failed to fully fund any transactions. And, yes, I do have a reliable and verified credit card fallback.