So I've just finished a phonecall to PP customer service (if that's what you can call it). I called with what I now understand to be a common complaint about PayPal; I have updated my address after moving house but PayPal keeps defaulting to my old address. This has resulted in me accidentally ordering £50 of eBay goods to be sent to my old address which I no longer have access to. I have reset my primary address, updated my bank account and cards, changed my eBay addresses etc... And still PP won't stop defaulting to my old address. So I call them this morning to complain and am told by 'Vivien' that there are a load of "hidden" previous addresses which exist on the PP system which needed to be removed manually. I'm also told that despite PayPal being an online e-commerce platform, and providing customers with an 'address manager' function, I should always call PayPal to confirm my address changes because it often won't allow you to change your address fully for security reasons. So a human being from PayPal needs to apparently verify your identity before the address will be changed. I was also told I would have to contact the eBay sellers and ask them to send my items to my new address. I pointed out to her that this goes against PayPal's and eBay's policies and that the sellers would be within their rights to refuse, as neither of us would be covered by buyer/seller protection if they sent my items to an address other than the one given to them by PayPal. She had no rebuttal for that. My problems with this are as follows... How the hell are customers supposed to know about this security check? They don't advertise or publicise this policy anywhere. I've checked. Even the automated voice on PayPal's own customer service line talks you through how to use the address manager when you call about change of address rather than putting you through to an advisor. If I go to my online address manager and change my address and everything appears to be accepted, how am I supposed to know that PayPal's system is going to override my changes and send the merchant my old address anyway because I haven't called and spoken to a person? If that's the case, what's the point of having an address manager at all? There was no error message or call out box asking me to contact PayPal. Nothing. Just this problem when I went on to make purchases. The fact is, I shouldn't have to call PayPal. If they want to verify my identity there are a number of ways they can do so (build in a text message code verification system, ask security questions about the account during the address changing process... etc) so I'm calling BS on the notion that this is some kind of security screening on their part. This is a glitch. A glitch that customer service is trying to gloss over by making up nonsense policies, has resulted in multiple transaction complications, and complaint threads on this forum dating back as far as 2010. I am alarmed that a multi-billion dollar company such as PayPal hasn't fixed this yet. After 14 years of using PayPal I'm honestly giving serious thought to closing my account and just using Google Pay or Apple Pay instead. I thought I would post about this experience here in the hopes that it might warn others. The address manager doesn't work. Don't rely on it. And PayPal customer service is clueless beyond belief.
