Actually, that’s not quite true.

I just read about this on Frank Haywood’s blog and thought it’s worth sharing.

It seems Paypal have done what many of us do when we’re ‘tweaking’ things – they’ve broken what they were trying to tweak!

For anyone who doesn’t know, Paypal’s IPN is the method that lets your payment script know that money has been succesfully received from the customers. That’s pretty important if you’re selling downloadable products because you want to make sure you get paid – of course – but you also want the customer to have the product immediately after they’ve paid.

That’s basic good customer service.

So where’s the problem? Well, right now, for reason Paypal don’t even know, some transactions aren’t updating the IPN properly. So your customer pays, you get the money, but your script doesn’t deliver the goods.

Unhappy customer.

For busy sites it’s affecting thousands of transactions. I’m not quite that busy myself, but I’m seeing a lot of support calls asking why the customer didn’t get their download.

Right now the only thing you can do is be aware of it, apologize to your customers and make sure they know it’s a temporary glitch. You don’t want them to think it’ll happen every time they buy from you.

Oh, and look into alternative payment methods. That’s probably not a bad idea, under the circumstances. Everyone needs a backup – even a multi-billion dollar company like Paypal.

You can read Paypal’s responses to the problem here.

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This is really time sensitive and after 10 pm EST 6th May 2008 this post no longer matters!

If you want to take payments online there are a number of ways to do it, but a lot of them require payment from you to sign up. That’s why Paypal is so popular. It’s free and it’s instant.

2CO is a great alternative and really you should always have an alternative payment processor, just in case. Your primary processor might dump you, or stop working, and your customers might prefer to use one type of processor compared to another.

Certainly, a lot of potential customers don’t like Paypal for some reason.

So, if you’ve got $50 you can sign up at 2CO and offer your customers a wider choice of payment methods. More choice usually means more sales. And that’s to be encouraged.

But for one day only, 2CO are offering to refund your signup fee. So you get an account for nothing. There’s no excuse not to sign up now – is there?

Why not read it from the horse’s mouth? Here’s their blog entry announcing the 12 hour special deal.

www.2checkout.com

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