Paypal Warning - non-notification of sales

[Clay]

I know that a lot of you out there are selling products via paypal.  I was made aware of a Paypal problem today by a client, and discovered that I had been hit as well.  Paypal is not sending out mail to sellers when a purchase is made, at least in some cases.  My client was contacted by a somewhat irritated customer who hadn't received $150 dollars worth of merchandise several weeks after ordering it.  That order was eventually shipped, but the customer was not happy and wound up taking business elsewhere.

I myself found an order that was a little over a month old sitting in my queue, fortunately for a much smaller amount of money.

So the moral of the story is check your Paypal account.

[Valamir]

I can confirm this.  

Its happened sporadically over the past couple of years, but the last month I've been hit with a rash of them.  I've always managed to catch them in the past by carefully reconcileing my Paypal History with my actual shipping history (which I maintain manually).  In the past I'd done that reconciliation roughly monthly but fairly haphazardly, but I'm trying to be more dilligent about it now, at least until this proves to be a temporary issue.

My nearest guess is that there are some orders that Paypal doesn't send a notice out to right away until they've confirmed the legitimacy of the payment.  If that takes too long, there apparently is a window for email notification, and so no email gets sent out, even thought the order gets put into the history.

So before doing your weekly (or whatever) shipping, I suggest scanning your paypal history from paypal.com to make sure it matches the emails you've received.

[Brett M. Bernstein]

I've also run into this problem. I contacted PayPal - all payments are accompanied by a notification. I have only missed maybe 3 in the past year - that's not bad. The problem is that email is not 100% reliable, so it's not PayPal's fault - it's just the cost of doing business online and accepting PayPal payments.

In my case, I just check my online store's list of orders every day to verify all payments are linked to an order. If you don't use a store then I suggest checking your PayPal stats every few days or at least once per week.

Another problem I've faced is that their pages don't always load properly. I get encryption errors and only the page's header occastionally with IE5.1. It started growing worse and then I couldn't even get the info I needed on an order. When I use my backup web browser (iCab), I have no problem. Their solution was to clear my cookies and restart. It worked once and then started up again. I gave up contacting them since it's such a pain and just use iCab to check PayPal-related stuff now.

Ever since eBay took over, the problems have grown, but they've also added a few nice features, so it balances out for me.

[Erick Wujcik]

...I suggest checking your PayPal stats every few days or at least once per week...

I check paypal daily because:

1. I might get one e-mail for every five orders, and

2. For some reason, every so often paypal sends to my old e-mail address.

Erick

[JSDiamond]

Also check your email account's spam blocking protocols, as higher caution settings may be identifying Paypal's automatic notifications as possible threats.

[Clay]

My spam filter is entirely possible as a source of the problem.  With all of the Phishing schemes out there the false PayPal headers are definitely in my spam catcher. I probably need to set up a filter ahead of my spam filter to catch legitimate paypal mail specifically.