eBay and PayPal Systems have been Unstable for at Leat Three Months

There have been so many problems with both eBay and PayPal systems for the past two months I keep wondering how they were not making the news.

Problem 1: If you add a new shipping address during eBay checkout it automatically changes your default shipping to the immediate previous address you added without your permission. Then if you are someone who make a lot of purchases you may find that your items are shipped to a third party address you added sometime in the past because ebay decided to use it as your default address without you explicitly doing so.

Problem 2: Since the middle of November most items you purchase and pay for are missing from your transaction history. To get transactions for January 19th for example you have to specify a date range starting with January 19th and ending with January 19th. After over two months this problem has not been fixed.

Problem 3: Sales Taxes: eBay automatically dropped sales taxes from all our items last week. Instead of harassing our buyers who were not charged sales taxes at checkout, we ended up just absorbing the additional cost of at least a few hundred dollars.

Problem 4: Duplicate transactions. Early this morning we attempted to pay for a large number of items we won. eBay checkout failed with an error asking that we attempt to submit payment later. We tried making payment three times before we realized that even though checkout failed and the items still show up as unpaid in eBay the payment was made from PayPal on all three occasions even though eBay still showed the items as unpaid.Took a message to our account manager to have all the transactions reversed and cost us a few hours

Problem 5: Every day a different interface, with different features and different defaults. One would expect to site changes wold be thoroughly tested before production implementation, not foisted on users as guinea pigs

These problems are not the entire list, there has been so many more.

Checkout Problems: Selling items and buyers are unable to complete checkout because the transaction just randomly fail and neither eBay or PayPal can explain to the buyer why their payment cannot go through. So they instruct the buyer to ask us to invoice them directly via PayPal.

I make a decent living using both eBay and Paypal and am used to being frustrated by the fact that every six month or so over the past four years they implement significant changes that affect our business. Usually negatively. But the past three or so months have been really testy. It is just unbelievable that companies of this size can have systems that behave this randomly.

The current problems are not isolated issues. yes they are more widespread than earlier problems but this has been going on for a while.

Problem with Resubmitting payments

Another problem that has been around for the past two months is errors resubmitting payments after a refund or reversal.

Let say a buyer submitted payment with a PO Box address and you have to refund it because you use UPS and do not ship to a PO box address. Or a buyer of a high value item need to item shipped to an alternate address from that submitted with the payment and you have to refund the payment so they can resubmit with the correct address. For the past two months the repayment failed with a message that the item had ended and is no longer available even though it is still shown as unpaid and you can still send an ebay invoice.

For a seller this is a hassle for your buyers and most times means the sale is lost.

This is also the error we are getting when we try to make payment for the items for which the payments were reversed yesterday.

Yeah, in any system you expect a few errors here and there but these have been running for months. That is what is acceptable about the current state of eBay and paypal applications. How do they expect us to continue trusting them with our moneys and livelihood.