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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