Last Friday I tried to buy something on ebay. It was a 2nd hand American 60GB PS3 in really good condition, £234 including shipping. So, "Buy It Now!" -> "this seller needs immediate payment" -> Paypal. I put in a message to the seller, clicked the confirm button, and... eventually... it came back with an error. It apologised and told me to refresh the page. So I did. It came back with an error again. So I tried it again. It came back with a slightly different error so I went all the way back to ebay and clicked "Buy It Now!" again, and attempted the payment process again. Rinse and repeat.
Eventually it started telling me that my card was being refused by my card provider.
So, by next Tuesday I gave up trying to resolve things myself, and called up my card provider's customer service. They put me through to their fraud unit, and I had to answer lots of security questions, and then they told me that on Friday, a total of six (!) authorisations for £234 were attempted, of which four went through, and then the card was locked for the suspicious looking identical transactions. Apparently they had tried calling me on the Saturday but I was away that day. They unlocked my card now they knew that it had not been stolen.
So I was "OMG! AH! MUST CALL PAYPAL!!" at that point, and so I thanked the fraud unit and put the phone down.
I found the contact details on the Paypal website - when you are logged in, there's a special code they give you on the website to key in on the phone so they know who you are, which is kind of neat. So I rang them, and there was this automated system talking at me. I entered the code and was expecting to be transferred to a real person at that point, but no. The automated voice on the phone went on, and insisted on using buggy voice recognition software throughout the process. It was extremely annoying. He was saying "Main menu, please say one of the following options blah blah blah blah" and you had to repeat exactly what he said, but it wasn't clear where options began or ended so I was saying something it couldn't understand, and kept having to redo things. By the time I got to talk to a real person I was just really really angry! >:(
I started to suspect; maybe it's dragging out the process because this is a premium rate phone number? It was 077 something, there was also another phone number on the site which it said was international and charged at international rates. So, I don't know how much this phone call will cost me or make them money. :(
I expect a lot of other people must be similarly infuriated by the automatic phone system, so that poor lady in the call centre, and the others alongside her, must have to deal with so many angry frustrated people!
When I told her what had happened she told me, in a manner which seemed as though she had given the speech a dozen, no, a hundred, no, a million times, maybe every day for years... that the authorisation just means that the bank/lender has put aside the money to pay, but they haven't taken it, so it's ok and will "drop off the system" in 3 to 5 days. And she was going to press a button to make it go faster. So I told her it's really bad that this error message was really generic and told me to refresh the page! She said in a way that she'd also said this a million times, that it's because the system was being overloaded and I should wait maybe an hour next time I see something like this happen.
So, worried about the phone bill and relieved but still infuriated, I hung up.
I knew that people have a lot of problems with Paypal, but I thought they were better than this. A huge hassle for me, and my credit card provider, because they have a stupid uninformative error message that tells you to do exactly they thing they don't want you to do, and there's a link in the page encouraging you to click it. Refresh! And they know about this, it's like a really routine occurance, and they're probably making money out of my stressed phonecalls! >:(
