Three Strikes, They're Out
Written: Mar 01 '02 (Updated Apr 13 '03)
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Pros: Soon it will be the hegemony.
Cons: Web site doesn't work, Customer Support hates you.
The Bottom Line: If you never need customer support, maybe you'll be able to put up with their other interface issues.
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| theraoulduke's Full Review: PayPal |
1) I'm trying to send money. I get to the point where I choose a shipping address. None of the previous addresses I had was right so I clicked on "Add a New Address". As it left the page, I noticed the Edit button. So when the new page came up I used the browser's (MSIE) back button to try and go back and edit an address. But I get a message telling me that the web page has expired. The message is some long thing that I don't feel like reading so maybe it told me something really important about how I could have done something to un-screw myself at that point, but I hit the back button again and ended up discovering that all the information I'd laboriously entered was gone. That is not user friendly customer service.
2) So I try and go through the "Help" and "Contact Us" links to report this. Of course, even those turn out to be broken. One more strike, as it were. See, I enter my question into the "Ask PayPal Here" text field, and then hit the "Ask Now" button. The resulting page tells me that "" wasn't found anywhere. So it just completely failed to get the text I just typed in. Right. Great. Yeah, that's wonderful. That's service. That's quality. That's a company that should be going out of business, dammit.
3) The kicker (or so I thought up to that point) is the dialog box which comes up telling me that I'm over the 700 character limit when I go and try to actually submit my complaint. Yay. That submission page says in a really small font "The box below [where you enter the text of your complaint] is approximately 700 characters, the maximum length for your message." So when I get their bloody limit dialog box, I start deleting entire paragraphs from my rant, and it just keeps on saying that I'm over the limit. So obviously the text box is nowhere near being restricted to 700 characters. Yay.
4) As I'm trying to do all this, the site keeps timing out my account so when I finally get the complaint edited down to 700 chars, it then asks me to re-login, and then fails to succeed, thus losing everything I entered.
5) There are no phone numbers anywhere that I can find on the site. Calling the number of their Palo Alto office doesn't help, they don't want you talking to any humans. Oh, wait, the 2nd time I call I get a person. I say that I'm trying to get a human in Customer Service. She asks me why I haven't called them... Uh, like I said, there weren't any phone numbers on their web site that I could find. So she starts to give me the supposed customer support number, without even asking if I like have a pen ready. So I tell her to hold her horses and I can hear her sighing on the other end. This really is wonderful customer interaction. 402 935 7733. So the number isn't even toll free. I ask her if they have a 1-800 number and instead of answering me like a human she just repeats the toll number and hangs up.
6) So at this point I just go to the web site and close my account. I will never use PayPal ever again.
7) I try calling the customer support number. It asks me to enter the phone number on my account... which I just closed. So I enter what might have been the number. It says that doesn't show up in their database, and loops back to asking me to enter the phone number. It doesn't give me any other option, like to talk to a human about all this. I go through a total of 3 attempts at entering numbers, and finally it says it will put me in touch with a human... At which point the voice system says that they are experiencing unusually heavy call volume and (drum roll) to please leave a message - wait! No, it doesn't offer me the chance to even leave a message, or to stay on hold, it just hangs up on me right there and then.
(An HILARIOUS update: Like a year later - a year after I've theoretically told them to bloody well cancel my account with them - I'm trying to buy something on eBay. They've bought PayPal, and try to get everybody to use them. I enter my credit card number and email address, and the system barfs saying that an account already exists using that data. And won't let me complete the transaction. THE KICKER is that THEN I get email from PayPal telling me they think my account is out of date and sternly warn me to update it lest they cancel it on me. Okay, so I thought that was the kicker, but then I do call them and am told that: when you close your account, if you do not explicitly remove your credit card or bank information, it will stay in the closed account for ever. The customer service rep claims that that information can then never be deleted, that the only way for it to go away is to have deleted it before you closed your account. However, and he confirmed this by looking on the web site while I was on the phone with him, the web site doesn't TELL you that when you are closing your account. So they are effectively purposefully trying to keep information I explicitly wish them to no longer have. (That, and it prevents me from ever opening a PayPal account with that info in the future - all this for a ten dollar item on eBay.))
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
theraoulduke
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Reviews written: 6
Trusted by: 0 members
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