I always thought PayPal was a fairly hands off, well run platform until Today (7/11/2020), but now I see that it has some serious issues! I've been a PayPal customer for many years, and just recently opened a business account on PayPal and connected it to my Shopify store. About 30% of payments on my Shopify store are from PayPal, so it is an important form of Payment. Normally PayPal transactions from my Shopify store run very smoothly through PayPal. Usually, when somebody pays via PayPal, i see the money in my PayPal account in minutes. On 7/11/2020, I noticed that this did not happen with two orders. In fact the money DIDN'T SHOW UP AT ALL, even though Shopify registered the transaction and had all the transaction details. Here's where the problems and my disappointment with PayPal started. Although it was Sunday, I was able to get in touch w/Shopify almost immediately and discuss this with a customer service rep via chat. Of course, they directed me to PayPal. The PayPal "chat" feature was useless as it was an unmanned chatbot that was a complete waist of time, so I decided to try calling. IT WAS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO GET SOMEONE ON THE PHONE AT PAYPAL. The automated system "hung up" on me several times and told me that there were no reps available. The automated system also did not register my phone number and did not recognize my business account. After calling back a dozen times after being hung up on, I was finally able to talk to a human. I actually called twice - one initial call and a follow-up call, and both times it was almost impossible to get through their automated phone "gatekeeper". Once I got a human on the phone, they were nice enough, but didn't really have a resolution other than to say that it was happening to other Shopify users and that the technicians were looking into it. My account was added to an internal PayPal ticket CSTS21294. There was no real resolution, or explanation provided as to why this happened. Pretty serious considering that these are "lost" financial transactions. A couple of hours later, PayPal / Shopify integration did start working again, but I still didn't have my money from the two orders that were "missed". As of writing this post I'm still waiting on that money and a resolution. Again pretty scary from an accounting perspective that this is even possible and that PayPal is this "brittle". What if I had a lot of orders that morning and missed this?? PayPal needs to do better!!! I waisted the better part of my Sunday tracking these issues.
