I have been a PayPal member since I was a freshman at Arizona State University in 2002. I registered with PayPal so I could pay the rent with my credit card to my roommate who had a PayPal business account and could receive credit card payments. Since then, I learned how safe it is to pay with PayPal. I use it to pay for services or products from shady websites, like to buy a fake ID for my under-age brother in Canada.
I have also occasionally used PayPal as a seller. They offer various services for merchants, like their popular (and lame) “Buy Now” button. But much more advanced than the Buy Button, they have a service called Website Payments Pro. Basically, this service allows online merchants to accept credit cards on their own websites without having to send buyers to PayPal’s website. It’s a powerful service. An unethical person with Website Payments Pro can even store and abuse customer credit card information (I’ve never done that; I’m just telling you about it).
In 2007, I had the ambitious (and, in hindsight, naive) plan to start a giant Arabic online audiobooks store. And I chose Website Payments Pro to facilitate purchases on the online store. Getting signed up for this service isn’t as straightforward as signing up for a free email account. You have to go through a lengthy screening process. They ask for business related documents, photocopies of your ID, and some other things. Anyway, I went through all of that back in 2007 and I got approved for the service.
As you should have expected, my audiobook store never materialized (let alone made actual sales). So, I was paying $30 for the Website Payments Pro month after month in the hope that my online store will need it. I also kept the service active because I didn’t wanna have to go through the same screening process in case I canceled it but then wanted to reactivate it. Eventually though, I got tired of paying the $30 monthly fee. So, I contacted PayPal and asked them if it was possible to deactivate the service and reactivate it later without having to go through the approval process. They said ‘yes’ and I disabled it immediately.
Fast forward to mid 2010…
I have been selling membership rights on my career coaching website for two years. I used ClickBank and PayPal in different periods to sell the membership. The membership is a one-time fee of $47. Recently, I changed the revenue model to a monthly subscription of $27. I wanted to make it easy for people to subscribe by offering a free 7-day trial and allowing a big selection of credit card types and nationalities. ClickBank is restrictive in this sense. So are PayPal’s basic merchant services. That’s why I needed to find a flexible solution for processing credit cards…
When you research credit card processing solutions, you come across a lot of confusing terminology:
- credit card processor,
- payment gateway,
- merchant account,
- etc…
I knew what the final solution on my website would look like and what it would do: it would charge a monthly fee to buyers’ credit cards. Simple enough, isn’t it? But finding that solution was very difficult, especially for a non-U.S. resident/citizen like me.
Resurrecting my old Website Payments Pro service
I had forgotten about Website Payment Pro. It’s been 3 years since I deactivated it. But then as I was researching for a payment solution, I stumbled across it once again. I remembered that I already have this service and that I just need to activate it. I felt great knowing that this service can do everything I want it to and I have already gone through the stringent approval process for it three years ago. So, I activated it without any problems.
Website Payments Pro by itself cannot do recurring monthly billing. You have to add this capability to your basic Website Payments Pro service. There’s an additional charge of $20 or $30 per month for this add-on. The good thing is that it doesn’t require a separate approval process or anything like that. You just activate it, pay for it, and you’re ready to go. So, I thought I’d activate the recurring billing add-on after I had worked out the technical details and programming of Website Payments Pro into my membership website. BAD IDEA!!!
I spent about three weeks or more programming Website Payments Pro into my website. Accepting credit cards on your own website is a sensitive matter that requires due diligence. When I finally finished the programming, all was left was that I activate the recurring billing add-on and deploy the new payment system on the live website. Guess what happened when I tried to activate the recurring billing add-on? You guessed it didn’t work, right? Haha, wrong. PayPal’s website said “recurring billing has been activated. Thank you for singing up for this service”
The moment of truth
Okay, so everything’s in order. Time to go live with the new system. You need to know though: changing the revenue model from a one-time fee to a monthly subscription isn’t only a matter of changing the payment processor and prices. It’s a much bigger undertaking. It involves:
- providing additional services that have naturally on-going value, which I did
- change the copywriting on the website to sell the monthly value
- change the email follow up campaigns
- and a lot more…
So, I did all of that and it was time for the moment of truth: deployment. I always get very excitedly nervous when I deploy big changes to my live website. But the deployment process went very smoothly. Everything looked polished and great. There were no funky errors or anything. Everything looked right. So, I asked my wife to try to sign up for the monthly service with her credit card. She got an error message. I checked the error logs in the backend and saw “DPRP is disabled for this merchant”, which means recurring payments (a.k.a Direct Payments Recurring Billing, DPRP) is not activated for my account…………………motherfucker.
What happened is this: even though PayPal confirmed that I successfully added recurring billing, the actual service is not enabled for me. It’s a bug in their system…But hey, it’s just a small bug. A call to PayPal’s customer service can probably have this sorted out, right?
Getting actual help from PayPal
I called PayPal’s customer service number. And as instructed by the voice command, I entered the phone number on my account, then the 6-digit PIN you can get from PayPal.com, and now the voice command is telling me to briefly describe what I need so that the call can be forwarded to the appropriate department: I try “merchant services”, “business solutions”, “website payments pro”…it doesn’t understand any of this. It finally tells me, “do you want payments?” I said “PAYMENTS” and now she’s giving me another set of options…Oh, god!! Anyway, I finally got to a human being. I explained my problem and now he forwards me to Merchant Support. The Merchant Support girl pretends to be sympathetic to my issue, creates a ticket for me and promises to personally keep an eye on this issue. Her name was Jennifer and she lied for I never heard from her again.
My issue gets forwarded from one department to the next. From Merchant Support to Merchant Vetting, back to Merchant Support and finally to Merchant Technical Services. Apparently, Merchant Technical Services (MTS for short) are the technical gods behind the (actually crappy) system that powers the merchant solutions of PayPal (Come to think of it, PayPal’s entire website is clunky, bloated, heavy, full of bugs, errors, bad redirects, and terrible interface).
Lost sales…
I have new members on my (however little) website on daily basis. In fact, moments after I deployed the new copywriting and changes, I received error notifications of failed payment attempts. So, this is an urgent matter that need to be fixed urgently. My business and my livelihood could be affected. But the MTS gods don’t care. They lowered the Severity of my ticket from Business Impact to General Info which gives it a lower priority in their queue.
I tried to call PayPal again and this time spoke to someone called Colleen and she sounded very much like Jennifer; sympathetic and promised to personally take care of my issue and send me an update in an hour. By now, I’m onto their little scheme of course, so I didn’t hold my breath. And as expected I never heard from her again.
MTS has their own website and ticketing system at http://ppmts.custhelp.com/. My first ticket was filed by PayPal’s own Merchant Services on their system. And they replied that they will “research the matter further and get back to me.” Having not heard from them for a couple of days, I opened another ticket with them, set its Severity to “Cannot accept payments” and in that ticket I referred to my older ticket. They replied to this ticket in the same way that they replied to my older ticket and also lowered its Severity from “Cannot accept payments” to “General Info”…Now, I’m without recourse and completely disheartened. A couple of days later, I post an update on my ticket asking for any information, like how long this is expected to take?
They basically replied with what amounts to “Keep quiet beggar. We’re looking into this and will let you know if we need anything from you.”
Here’s their exact reply, if you’re interested:
At this time the your issue regarding Recurring Payments is still be
worked, a resolution has not yet been determined. Please watch for
emails regarding this issue for any further communication or information
we may need from you.
That was two days ago. There’s nothing I can do now but wait and reply to emails from interested buyers asking me about when membership on my website will open again. But I’m also looking for other payment solutions.
What a joke this is. How can I ever rely on PayPal to do business when this is how they start me out? And if they do this to me, they can probably do it to you and anyone else…
