Community Chat 4/25

PayPal_Adrian
PayPal Employee
PayPal Employee

Hey everybody!

 

Join the PayPal Community Forums moderation team in our weekly Community Chat on Wednesday, April 25th, from 4 to 5 PM CDT (2-3 PM PDT). 

 

Our moderator staff will be here to answer your questions regarding PayPal - or just to get to know you. This thread will remain locked until the chat is open, so if you have a question you'd like to see answered by the community before then, please feel free to post a topic by clicking on "Post a Topic" and selecting the appropriate board.  As always, PayPal customer service can be reached by clicking on "Contact Us" and selecting help via phone or email.

 

See you then!

 

Adrian

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16 REPLIES 16

PayPal_Frank
Administrator
Administrator

@PayPal_Olivia wrote:

...

 

I'd also like to learn how to play disc golf. Hey Frank - will you teach me some time?

 

Olivia


Sure :D! It's pretty easy, you just have to throw a frisbee (disc) into a basket.  Same rules as golf.

 

- Frank

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PayPal_Frank
Administrator
Administrator

Hi everyone,

 

My favorite Spring/Summer activity is Disc Golfing (aka Frisbee Golf). 🙂

 

- Frank

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PayPal_Adrian
PayPal Employee
PayPal Employee

Spring is a busy time for my family.  This year, I have two baseball teams to watch, one volleyball team, and a swim team.  I'm beginning to understand why my mother felt I should keep extracurricular activities to a minimum and just enjoy life! Smiley Very Happy

 

So, when I'm not being baked by the sun in the bleachers, catching sand in my shoes at the court, or clearing the swimming pool chlorine out of my nose I .... try to catch a movie over the net.  Or hit the zoo.  Provided I don't need a nap Smiley Wink

 

 

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jamarty
Contributor
Contributor

We’ve had several issues with recurring payments over the last few months. There have been several instances where a customer will contact us because we’ve disabled their account for non-payment. We disable because PayPal reports, via IPN, that the monthly payment has failed. On the recurring payments history in PayPal, nothing appears for the payment in question for customer; no success or failed message for the date the payment should have been processed. The customer, however, will claim that their credit card or PayPal account has been charged, and they can show it. A couple of our customers even contacted PayPal themselves before contacting us and they’ve been told a number of things. One was told their payment was flagged, but they couldn’t be told why it was. PayPal’s solution was for us to manually invoice them. Another customer was told by PayPal that we didn’t request payment from the customer, so that’s why we didn’t receive the payment. What does that mean?? It’s a recurring payment; it should be “requested” automatically every 30 days, no? This customer was told that we need to request payment and PayPal is “set up properly to make this a recurring payment.” Two customers, just today, had their reoccurring payment fail, and when they contacted PayPal, they were told the wrong banking account (apparently someone else’s) was associated with their PayPal account. (!?)

 

 

These issues have been going on for months and have affected dozens of customers. They’ll see that their payments are processing normally, but PayPal tells us that it either failed, or nothing happened at all. This is obviously a terrible thing to have happen and for PayPal to keep coming up with the best solution as “just invoice them manually” is also a terrible solution.

 

I can provide specific examples, IDs, etc. What can we do to prevent these issues, or to efficiently resolve these issues as the merchant so we’re not making the customer contact PayPal themselves because PayPal is messiing up?

 

EDIT: Sorry to combo break the fun chat going on here... 😕
EDIT: for the record I said **bleep** but the censor apparently doesn't like that word so it change it to "*bleep*". I changed it so you guys didn't think i was that crass!

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PayPal_Adrian
PayPal Employee
PayPal Employee

jamarty -

 

Sorry we got you so close to the close.  One of us will take a look at this respond - please stay tuned for an update, even though I know you can't post back. 

 

If you have more questions after the response, I would suggest linking back to this thread and posting a new question in the About Business board.

 

Thanks for your patience!

 

Adrian

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PayPal_Frank
Administrator
Administrator

Hi jamarty,

 

I'm sorry to hear about the recent issues.  It sounds like there are multiple issues here and it's hard to provide a specific explanation without reviewing the buyer accounts.  When a recurring payment attempt fails, it's usually due to one of the following:

 

- The buyer's credit/debit card failed authorization or billing address verification (AVS) at the time of the charge or

- The PayPal security system is blocking the payment.  This can be caused by many different factors which is why the buyers may have reported different answers.

 

Typically these issues are not related to the selling account at all and it's something that happens rarely.  Most payments are processed without issue.  While these issues are expected for any merchant receiving recurring payments, It is unusual that so many of your clients would be affected.  If you think this is a bug, I recommend filing a ticket with Merchant Technical Services here: https://ppmts.custhelp.com/app/ask

 

Unfortunately, there is no way to completely avoid these issues but there are some settings that may help depending on what type of recurring payments you are using.  There are two recurring payments variables:  FAILEDINITAMTACTION and MAXFAILEDPAYMENTS that can be tweaked to help with these situations.

 

FAILEDINITAMTACTION can be set to "ContinueOnFailure" which will allow a buyer to setup a successful recurring payment profile even if the first payment attempt fails (for any reason).  This will allow the merchant to easily rebill the customer once the issue has been resolved on the buyer's end.  (See theBillOutstandingAmountAPI in the guide linked below)

 

MAXFAILEDPAYMENTS  applies to existing recurring payment profiles and sets the maximum number of allowed failed payments before a recurring payment profile is cancelled.

 

I recommend contacting your developer or shopping cart provider to see if these settings can be tweaked. For more information about Recurring Payments see this Guide:

 

Handling Recurring Payments

 

I hope this helps. 🙂

 

- Frank

 

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PayPal_Adrian
PayPal Employee
PayPal Employee

Thank you to everyone for participating in this week's chat session! 

 

The weekly chat session is now closed.  All thread content will remain viewable, but locked.  Any questions that have not yet been responded to by a moderator or employee will receive a response within the next hour.

 

If you missed chatting with us today, please come back next Wednesday, May 2nd, at 4PM Central time. We'd love to meet you!

 

See you then!

 

Adrian

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