PayPal Bug Report, A Support Failure, and Fire as Hyperbole

Are the mega-companies too big?

Digital payments and processing has been under a lot of regulatory scrutiny in the past couple of years. You may have seen several changes in the tax reporting tools in PayPal and the likes. In order to remain compliant many technical pivots and updates have been made within these platforms. The speed at which the changes have been made has allowed for some sloppy dev.

The bug we are sharing is within the Beneficial Owners setup. This is the second step in connecting any new website to PayPal, just after confirming your identity. One of our clients is a nonprofit and processes north of 6 figures a year with PayPal. As you know, nonprofits do not have owners. The Beneficial Owners screen forces you to add executives and/or owners. One criteria for both is an ownership percent. All combinations of ownership (including 0%) throw an error. The system is aware of nonprofits having no ownership, but the Beneficial Owner setup is not.

For six weeks we worked with their support team to resolve the issue and get our client’s site connected and launched. They were unable to. We were told that PayPal is aware of the bug and added our case to their list of examples. Furthermore we were informed that we wouldn’t be notified when it was fixed and to just periodically keep trying to connect the site. (see attached for verbiage)

We are now customers of Authorize.net whose system and setup was seamless.

** The image is not an actual photo of any company’s support person ignoring a fire. The flames are merely an analogy for the urgency our team felt. Minus a few blood pressure spikes, no one was injured in this scenario.

Thanks for reading,
Morgan

Please email me at OceanAndCakeCreative@gmail.com with any comments, questions, or criticisms.