Why is the Paypal website so slow?

[ScirraTom]

Hi there,

New to this forum.  I'm a web developer for Scirra.com

We sell mainly via Paypal.  Logging into Paypal, searching for transactions, the entire experience is frustratingly slow.

Why is the website so slow, and what are the plans to fix it?  If it continues to be as slow as it is we're happy to find a faster service.

Here's a breakdown of normal times I observe logging in and finding a transaction:

Paypal homepage: 3.5 seconds
Login page: 11 seconds
Processing login: 7 seconds
Getting to homepage: 12 seconds
Click history: 14.5 seconds
Click find a transaction: 4 seconds
Find a transaction on email: 11.5 seconds

I would expect a website like this to load under a few seconds per page.  Clicking the history button and it taking nearly 15 seconds is unusually poor performance.  I'm not even sure how you could write the history page to take that long to load.

[secuholla]

Add me to the list of people viewing this as slow. While using different browsers has different results, I expect when I find a transation using a last name, for the result to show in 2 seconds or less and I have had this time take up to 15 seconds. Very surprised since PayPal is who they are.

[sam84]

+1. Here I am waiting (five minutes at the moment) to download my history from 1st April to 31st March. I've no idea if it's just crashed or if it'll eventually spark into life (I think the later but can't be sure).

Simply going from page to page takes, and has always taken, far far too long. Normally 5/10 seconds between the most basic page loads, and anything remotely complex far longer. As others have said, I have fast internet and no issues with any other site. 

Please sort it out, it's painful.

[parkerhm]

I joined the PayPal community just to comment on this thread. The site has been slow in my experience for over a year (!) on multiple browsers, all platforms - Mac, Windows, PC, and from multiple locations (I only have used Pittsburgh PA and Connecticut). Doing work for clients using PayPal is agonizing when trying to resolve issues by browsing and searching transactions. Browsing transactions is slow, just clicking "Basic Search" to get to the Search screen takes 4 seconds, and today doing an "Advanced Search" for the last name "Smith" took 13 seconds when searching between December 2010 and December 2012. I have so few transactions (maybe 100?) that a database query shouldn't take this long. Other computer scientists say they suspect that either A) PayPal might be rate-limiting their queries so a few customers don't burden their servers, to ensure other PayPal users don't have a subpar slow experience, or B) simply not upgrading their infrastructure because they don't have a competitor that is as large as they are, as in, they don't need to due to lack of competitive pressures.

Maybe just Pittsburgh and CT are slow, and these comments unfairly add to the myth that PayPal is slow, but surely PayPal could benchmark the time between when a user performs a search and when results are sent to the user and start helping customers in certain locations where performance is unacceptably slow.

The API is fast, though. We love your API.

Dr. Parker Mills

[vincentkezel]

I agree with all the above posters about the slowness. I see 3-5 seconds load time of many basic PayPal pages including profile settings, and directly accessing a transaction or refund. Using pages for search, download logs, or login is my area of frustratation.

When I login, I have to wait 15+ seconds and then refresh to become logged in. If I "click here to refresh" I get logged out, or if I just wait patiently it sits there forever. When using advanced search, it takes 2 minutes to load small queries like searching by email with a date range of the last 7 days. If I specify larger date ranges than 7 days it usually sits there forever until I'm logged out for inactivity. Also browing the basic search for categories of debit card uses, incoming payments, refunds etc takes 30+ seconds per page.

Tried chrome, firefox, IE, and tried on desktops and laptops, and on different internet connections. I have 500+ balance affecting transactions per day... but taking 2 minutes to seach through 3500 transactions for all trans with specified email seems too slow. Bad mysql queries on 100x the data size are faster than this.

[flenneau]

We have 2 online websites for direct consumer sales.  Accessing Paypal is excruciatingly Slow!!  We have the Corporate Level of Internet Service, with the highest speeds possible, yet loading Paypal takes way too long!!  We all pay big bucks over the year to use Paypal to handle our money, (much like a bank), but we don't get the service we anticipate. 

It is time for Paypal to offer its' subscribers more for their money, including faster response times for their web pages.  I know that searching their database for an email address should be much faster than it is, or even using a unique transaction idetifier as the key field in the search should reduce the amount of time required to complete the search, but no, they take roughly the same amount of time;  'too much time'!!

If anyone from Paypal is moderating this forum, please respond to us with some sort of an update, at least to indicate that the problem is being looked into!

This is after all the 'PayPal / Community Help Forum', but where the heck is the 'help' when so many people are asking for it??

Get off your Butts PayPal and SUPPORT YOUR USERS, who in fact, keep you in business!!

Frustrated in Ontario, Canada.

[epogee]

Agreed - painfully slow. In life, you generally find the richer a company is, the better and faster their websites. With paypal it's the opposite. It's as if they refuse to spend a single penny of their profits on improving their site.

I cannot believe that paypal management has let this issue drag on for years (I've experienced the slothlike nature of paypal's website  for at least 4years) without dealing with it. When will paypal learn this is not about pacifying us users that complain. Millions of people will give up with paypal and use something else - which costs paypal lost profits.

And while I'm at it, I've got to raise a complaint about the way that deductions made to your account (eg fraud / chargebacks etc) are made as invisible as possible, so you won't notice.eg in the 'show all transactions' or the 'show transactions with balance' field. You are given no notification that a chargeback has been made - paypal should email sellers to inform them, so they have an opportunity to contest it, and if the matter is fraudulent, paypal just take the money and leave you to challenge them to refund it - even if the laughable 'seller proteciton' applies. Come on paypal, treat your customers fairly - you might get more of them that way!

[baytrading1]

For us too, very very, very snail like speed. Saying that I am sure that a snail is faster then paypal pages to load. Despite the many people who have commented on this thread, nothing seems to be done by the paypal engineers. At least we could do with a response from someone at paypal

[wkwong11]

I just found this thread through a Google thread and wanted to add that my experience over the past 5 years with nearly daily use of Paypal has been the same. Extremely slow.

I get that secured sites could take longer to load things, but when I use sites from various banks such as Chase, Wells Fargo, Bofa, etc, they are all much faster.

Luckily I'm able to perform most functions through API on my website backend. I dread the need to ever have to login to the actual PayPal website. Pulling up reports or searching for transactions takes forever. Definitely a major inconvenience for small business owners who usually already don't have enough time on their hands.

[Seand0rpon]

Registering just to complain, as I'm sure many others are doing.  I HATE when a customer calls up, and I have to look up his information.  If there isn't a direct link from a PayPal payment for an eBay item, it will take forever.  And this doesn't include when you or your customer aren't completely sure of order date, name, etc.  One search can take 20-30 minutes to track down.  

It's also laughable that despite all these complaints there are two PayPal 'technical experts' who both advise changing browsers.  Do you think we are that stupid?  It didn't take long for them to abandon this thread, knowing there was absolutely no answer they could give that would do anything for anyone.  Now that eBay=PayPal there isn't much recourse unless you want to throw away customers.  Also looks like this forum has censored the word s.uck.s.  I wonder why...

**bleep**

[baytrading1]

Yes I find the broken links very frustrating. When you click on the 'View PayPal transaction' link on an ebay item instead of it taking you the transaction itself, it takes you to a rundown of the latest payments instead. Then you have to g back to the sale page, look up the date and paid amount and you have to go trawling through the payments made for everything else until you find the one you are looking for. If there are 2 payments of the same amoun and for the same item as it had more than one item in the listing, you have to make sure you are refunding the right person as otherwise you will lose out. What a farse from a company that charges so high for each transaction