Since the last week of MAY (2010) neither I nor my customers have been receiving Subscription Payment Failure notices. (Anyone who has used PayPal subscription services over the years knows that the system normally sends email warning notices to the customer and the merchant when subscription payments fail - one on the first attempt and another on the second attempt 3 days later before PayPal just auto cancels the subscription on the 3rd attempt 3 days after the second attempt).
But now it's been over two months that the subscription payment failure email notification system at PayPal has been broken and not sending out these important notifications to customers and merchants.
This obviously leads to mysterious accidental cancellations with no warning to the customer or merchant.
I have confirmed that other PayPal merchants using the Subscription Payments service have also been experiencing the same problem since late May / early June.
I have also confirmed that PayPal is aware of the problem.
First I called PayPal and explained the issue to a PayPal agent.
After trying several different ways to explain to her what the subscription payment failure email notifications were and that they simply are not being sent out, finally she put me on hold for a few minutes and then came back and told me:
"PayPal developers are aware of the problem and are working on it. There is no ETA on when it will be fixed."
Then several days later I received an email from a PayPal tech support agent that said/asked this:
"Do you have a recent example, within the last three days, of a failed payment for a subscription that you did not receive a notification for? Are these missing e-mail notifications or are your referring to Instant Payment Notification?"
So then I replied in obvious frustration in big capital letters to the effect:
A) obviously I cannot give an them an example of something that is not showing in the PayPal system / not working and
B) I was told by a PayPal agent over the phone that this was already a known issue with the PayPal payment failure notification system and not isolated to my account, but actually wide-spread
A few hours later I received this reply from the support agent:
"Upon further investigation, we are aware of this issue and our developers are working to resolve it. I will update you with more information as it becomes available. If you have any additional information or updates to your issue, please use the instructions in this email to update your ticket."
How can an issue this important, already ackowledged and known about by the developers, go on for two months without support staff at https://ppmts.custhelp.com not knowing and end up with them having to send me an email asking me to provide invisible evidence?
Haven't Found your Answer?
It happens. Hit the "Login to Ask the community" button to create a question for the PayPal community.
