Guide sales glitch resolved

Phew! Sometimes online sales is the cat’s meow. Sometimes it’s a dyspeptic cougar.

In the latter part of June, we received an email from a boater saying that PayPal refused to allow him to buy our guides. It had frozen up, in fact, when he tried to click on a “Complete Purchase” button.

We weren’t too panicked. Usually those kinds of things are a one-off quirk or maybe the buyer was clicking on the button while omitting some crucial information.

And when we tried to order a guide, we were successful. So we told the buyer: no worries, just try again.

Then we got another email from a frustrated customer, then another, then… we tried again to buy a guide and we, too, were locked out by PayPal. Two or three sales, for some reason to buyers who did not have a PayPal account, went through. Otherwise sales of our guides, during by far the best season for sales, withered to nothing.

We visited PayPal forums online and learned that many others were also having the same problem.

So we opened a merchant support ticket at PayPal, who acknowledged the issue:

Hi Jim,

Thanks for reaching out to PayPal’s Global Technical Support team. Sorry to hear about the problem you’re seeing with the PayPal’s complete purchase button. I can understand this issue is frustrating and I do apologize for any inconvenience.

Note: This is an ongoing problem with the PayPal currently.

Our product team are working on this issue to find the root cause. I will get back to you as soon as I get a response from them. We will follow up with the internal team and update you with more information as it becomes available meanwhile.

Thanks for keeping such kind patience.

Sincerely,
Merchant Technical Support
PayPal

We contacted customers who had emailed us regarding their inability to buy guides. We offered to send them the guides if they e-transferred the funds to us. Many were happy to do that.

Then a company which hosts our cruising guides on their servers, E-junkie, contacted us to say that another vendor had discovered a work-around. If we checked a box in our account to “Require Buyer’s Shipping Address” then PayPal would allow the sale to go through.

Mystery to us, but it worked. Problem was, one customer wanted to know why we wanted his home address when we only needed his email address to send him the guides.

Truth was we didn’t know, which obviously was not a very reassuring admission.

But it worked. Finally, on June 30, we were contacted by E-junkie who said PayPal had solved they issue and things could go back to normal.

We don’t know how many customers were turned off by the frozen links (or by our insistence that they provide a home address!), but if you are one of them, know that you will probably have no issues now with the purchase process and we won’t ask you where you live.

And another silver lining is that we had some nice conversations with customers who asked about the guides and shared their plans for the sailing season. 

This is a great job. 

Stay safe,
Jim and Lynne