Why is the e-mail address of a payment receipt now "paypal" instead of the customer's?

khurasanminis
Contributor
Contributor

This happened a few years ago, paypal corrected it, but now ... it's back.

 

When an e-mail comes in with a notification of payment for some of my products, the e-mail it comes in from is sometimes "service at paypal dot com" instead of the purchaser's e-mail address.

 

Other times it is the purchaser's e-mail address, as has traditionally been the case.

 

This is a bit of a hassle for the business.  Why is it happening?

 

Many of us use the e-mail in order to process the orders.  If the e-mail address says "paypal" instead of the customer's name, it makes it harder to look for orders from that customer.  Additionally, when responding to the customer's order, if you want the customer to get the response, you now have to find the customer's e-mall address in the order, copy it, delete the paypal address, and paste the customer's e-mail address in after hitting reply. All for what purpose, I'm not sure.

 

So again I'm wondering why the e-mail with the order comes in from "service at paypal dot com" -- thanks.

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12 REPLIES 12

Whac-A-Mole
Frequent Advisor
Frequent Advisor

the buyer email addr is shown as 'reply to' in the payment notice email.

if you need to find the order,you can search by transaction number ,email address or specify a date range 

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AESupply
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same complaint. I used to be able to reply to the comnfirmation and a legible summary of the order would be sent back to the customer along with whatever I needed to add.

 

The Legible part went away long ago. Now the customers email address... Bottom line is - what used to be working well and so easy gets replaced by something much more difficult.... Why??

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Whac-A-Mole
Frequent Advisor
Frequent Advisor

You have to find another system to handle confirmation ,many websites accept credit card as well as paypal,they dont need Paypal for order confimation,like Sierra Trading,Macy ,Vitamin shops,so it can be done

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AESupply
Contributor
Contributor

I know there are workarounds to almost everything. It would be nice if it wasn't always up to us to find them.

 

This email address is only an issue with some of the emails, not all. What would be great is if someone in Paypal either explained the change and why... or, just fixed it...

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Whac-A-Mole
Frequent Advisor
Frequent Advisor

I guess one way to look at it is like this-

The email is a confirmation to you from Paypal,you are its client,as long as they have contacted you ,their job is done.

If you manage to see another use for that email,more power to you.

Your client email is in the heading under 'reply to',if you click on it,you start an email with your client.

(see Paypal serves you,not your client,what you do with your client is between you and your client) .

We may be asking too much from a payment processor,like we want to see what they purchase 5 years ago or what is the description of the item /service rendered or name and address and email all lined up for a report?

these are extras you may have to do it outside Paypal or if you can download all the history and use another piece of software to achieve what you want.

Some folks use QUICKEN,I just use a 19 cents spiral binder book as a sales ledger,to each his own.

The venues where I sell keep my sales records,one keeps my pictures as well, I dont need Paypal until it sends me the 1099.

Some merchants like to keep all the customer emails for mass marketing campaign,I dont care,I dont think it makes any difference.   

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AESupply
Contributor
Contributor

I chose to use paypal because it was easy and convenient. I've processeed millions of dollars through their system.

 

It's not that I'm asking for some additional feature. Many things that used to work no longer do. I can't help thinking some of them are just broken. If I'm wrong I would like someone to officially confirm the changes were made on purpose.

 

Another example...

 

can't search activity with a partial name - this used to work fine with the classic interface. It has been this way for some time now.

 

It just seems like PayPal is ignoring all these complaints, not bothering to explain (or fix) whatever has changed.

 

That's not a good way to do business and at some point PayPal may outgrow its usefulness. 

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khurasanminis
Contributor
Contributor

We may be asking too much from a payment processor,like we want to see what they purchase 5 years ago or what is the description of the item /service rendered or name and address and email all lined up for a report?

 

I don't think you're really understanding the issue here.  The issue is, when you get a notification of payment received from paypal, the "reply to" e-mail that has always been embadded in the e-mail has always been the customer's paypal e-mail address.  So the e-mail comes in to you from "joeblow1000 AT notarealemail DOT com" -- so if you store your e-mails as one way to keep track of orders, you can see the customers e-mail as you scroll down.

 

Equally importantly, if you want to respond to the e-mail notification and let the customer know that you got the payment and you're working on fullfllment, you can hit reply and then send the customer the response, and the e-mail that gets loaded into the response is the customer's e-mail.

 

It's not "asking too much of a payment processor" to continue to do what they have done for years.  This is how the notification e-mails have gone out to payees since 2007 at least, when I started accepting paypal as a payment method.

 

But lately, and randomly, the reply to comes in not as the payor, but as "service at paypal dot com."  Why? 

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Whac-A-Mole
Frequent Advisor
Frequent Advisor

customer email is -reply to,in the paypal notice.

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Whac-A-Mole
Frequent Advisor
Frequent Advisor

I just tested with one of my Paypal notice,when I hit reply,the customer email address is inserted and the content of the payment notice is in the email content?

you should talk to your web designer ,may be he can do something for you? 

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