At 9:28 PM -0400 8/29/2008, Steve R wrote:
>At 6:51 PM -0400 8/29/08, Dan posted:
>>   At 4:32 PM -0400 8/29/2008, Steve R wrote:
>>>been struggling with trying to get paypal to accept a payment [...]
>>>Everything went normally until the final page when there would be a
>>>message that my payment was being processed. Within minutes I'd get
>>>an email (a nice collection of 9 so far) telling me that my payment
>>>needed to be resent.
>>
>>   If you don't mind, would you please forward one of those emails to me?
>
>Other than listing the item, this is the sum total (minus all the
>footers) of the message, all 9 times:
>
>"Sorry, your recent PayPal payment did not go through. As a result, the
>item(s) below have not received payment.Please return to eBay to resubmit
>your payment again."

yea.  That's their engrish server-side error return.  I got that 
twice last year.  That it seemed to be fixed when you switched to 
Firefox was probably coincidence.

>  >  Paypal sends such when there is a back-end SERVER related error.  It
>>   doesn't sound like this has anything to do with using Safari.
>
>There are websites where I get those error messages. There were no
>such error messages, everything went as usual on the website.

Yes and no.  You didn't get the error on the server to which you were 
talking.  The error occurred BEHIND that server, in the back-end 
pools that actually perform the transactions.  At that point, you're 
no longer talking to that page on Paypal, so the only way they can 
notify you of a problem is via email.   Kindof dumb of Paypal to make 
you go back to eBay and resubmit.  They *have* the data they need. 
They should just retry.

Um, keep in mind that Paypal does a lot of things in the front-end 
servers, that you see.  But most of it is pretty visual bookkeeping 
to make you, the customer, happy.  They cover things with their own 
float - that's how they make most transactions seem "instantaneous". 
The *real* transaction - the back-end server talking to the credit 
card processor's servers who in turn talks to the bank's servers - 
happens at a later time.  Paypal's queues run VERY full.  Sometimes 
the transactions can take a few minutes to run, sometimes as much as 
an hour.

...By comparison, if you had a real merchant account, you would pass 
the data to the processor where it would be be half-processed - 
authorizations obtained.  Then, hours or even days later, you would 
reconnect to the processor and "close the batch", which would then 
actually execute all the transactions.

>  >>Between phone calls to my credit card companies, trying to leave
>  >>feedback on the support site, searching google for similar problems
>>>and smoking most of a pack of cigarettes, I wasted most of today.
>>
>>   You didn't call Paypal?
>
>Yes, and sat on hold for more than 45 minutes at which point I hung
>up. Time is money.

Wow.  I've never had more than a 5 or 10 minute hold with Paypal.  Not good. :(

- Dan.
-- 
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth

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