PayPal Payments Notification

[saucysal]

Please do not attack me, or refer me to an existing thread, which I have read!

We get OCCASIONAL, much less than 1 per cent of orders, where the order goes into the payment pending page on Actinic, but payment has been successfully made by PayPal. We have all payments going via SagePay, where the customer chooses the payment method icon, one of which is PayPal. When we want to check on anything regarding payments, we go onto SagePay, where all payments and failures are listed, including the PayPal ones. In the Occasional cases I have referred to, SagePay either does not list the payment at all, as successful or as failed, or it lists it as failed. However, when searching on PayPal we find the successful payment.

We have a warning in our Checkout that if a customer does not receive any confirmation emails from us and is not taken back to the Receipt page, that they contact us immediately. However, few people read anything. We usually find out about the aforesaid Occasional errors several weeks later when the customer chases up their order. I suspect that the customer may have done something odd when making the payment which has resulted in the successful payment not being tagged to the order.

Any ideas about how we can prevent these Occasional errors? I don't want to have to check through, matching up all orders and payments every day to find them as this is very time consuming. It is not a major problem. At the moment we are just relying on customers contacting us at some point.

Sarah

[Mike Hughes]

I would setup Paypal as an option within Actinic and let the customer choose there.

From the sound of it, the problem is with sagepay so probably best to cut them out of the loop.

Mike

[leehack]

I agree with Mike, i don't quite get the Paypal within Sagepay idea. If a customer wants to pay by paypal, surely they will want to see it as an option when they go to pay, not have to go to sagepay to find it. By all means have it as part of sagepay, but also as Mike says, have it as a standalone choice too. The key is choice and also having a backup payment method, i think PSP (whether paypal is an option on that or not) + paypal is best setup.

[saucysal]

Been there, done that

We used to have PayPal as a separate option, and had it like that some for time. However, we found that PayPal did not give full protection for these payments, and we had some problems with chargebacks.

Going through SagePay first, we get full protection, and we can check the Third Man reports, and despatch goods signature required if they have a high fraud score.

By taking them to SagePay first, where they can see all the payment option buttons, may encourage more to pay by credit or debit card on SagePay rather than clicking the PayPal button, as some people think PayPal is safer than giving their card details on a website, but seeing it is on SagePay may make them change their mind. Charges to us for card payments are less than the PayPal charges.

We state on the last page of the Checkout that they will have the option of paying by PayPal when clicking Confirm Order, and refer to PayPal elsewhere on the site, including an icon on the homepage.


Sarah

[leehack]

Not a lot i can really say to counter that, it's a legitimate answer. My only concern would be you are making very "you" centric decisions, when the reality is as this time in the process, you generally want to be making "user" centric decisions, but that is a decision for each business to make. Having a message on checkout to get them to contact you if there is a problem is just adding negativety to a process where confidence is key though, i don't agree with that.

Like you say probably no doubt they are doing something strange during the process that is triggering this problem, i can only suggest setting up a dummy product for 1p and going through the process trying everything you can think of to break it and see what happens. There must be a set of circumstances that causes this.

[Sean Williams]

We used to have PayPal as a separate option, and had it like that some for time. However, we found that PayPal did not give full protection for these payments, and we had some problems with chargebacks.
Sarah

Hmmm
after attending the Conference, we had decided to accept PayPal. I have always been under the impression that PayPal avoided chargebacks due to the way PayPal take the money from their customers!
Now I hear it is susceptible to chargebacks just the same as any card

When you say that via Sagepay you have full protection - I'm assuming you mean you have the benefit of their checking mechanisms, but are not insured against chargebacks?

It really is time in this day and age that secure online selling really is secure from the merchants point of view.