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Paypal Grinds To A Halt
BillBrasky writes "After a 'Monthly Software Update', it appears that PayPal started having problems. There were reports all weekend of troubles, and as of Monday night here, I can't access it at all (connection time out). One user even reported that his PayPal Debit card was getting refused!" A message on the site now says the site is expected to be back at 8:10 PM PDT, not long from now.
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Maybe not the smartest place to have put my life savings?
They have to deal with a slashdotting.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6228586/
msnbc also has an article about the outtages
Get out your crystal balls. What effect do you think this will have on the share price of EBAY tomorrow? Will that constitute a buying or selling opportunity?
Yeah, so paypal.com is having issues loading. Makes sense to slashdot them too!
The first six or seven times I tried clicking through to this story slashdot told me "Nothing to see here. Move along." Problem in the subscription code?
Anyway this was bound to happen sooner or later. There's frankly no way to test large-scale use of a resource like that because in order to REALLY test it you have to exchange a lot of data with assorted financial institutions which will probably not be very forgiving about something like that. Paypal's never given me any trouble whatsoever and I think that not being able to use it for a day or so is acceptable. Not being able to access debit card funds could be a serious blow to someone foolish enough to store a lot of money in paypal, but otherwise it should have little impact.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...most sites that rely on paypal (donations to stay up) don't really get donations anyways. Hard to bring a non-existant economic action to a halt ;-)
hehe I'm a silly goose.
Before you mod me funny, think, perhaps I was insightfully funny?
or just a
Bank Panic
Anybody can work under ideal circumstances. -- Jeff K. (January 4, 2001)
I tried to pay for my sampling sweep plugin this morning and it didn't work! How am I supposed to get a "lightning fast payment AA+++++++++++++" feedback now???
This is Karma biting Paypal in the ass. Paypal, thanks for all of the overcharging and fee stacking ... bungholes.
I recieved a message that they were unavailable about 1 this afternoon. I was able to get back in a few minutes ago but it was majorly slow. Glad I didn't need to pay for anything today.
Profanity - The sign of a small mind trying to express itself.
I just got an email from them asking me to verify my account information and it was working just fine!
The ones that tell me I need to log in to my account because of the possible security problem and the URL is to a server in Korea.
That sucking sound you hear is my bandwidth.
They were down for me about one hour. Leave it to slashdot to fucking panic.....
They do have a blurb on the site about problems but I'm not having any trouble. Why can't we mod articles as trolls.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
This is just one of their ways of telling people they are not a bank. :)
The next time they get into trouble for not following banking rules they can say
"See, we're not a bank...banks don't crash"
How much negative feedback will be left on ebay due to user stupidity? The world wonders...
I know lets post links to their server and slashdot the crap out of them!
http://www.paypalsucks.org/
...cuz a Paypal outage is neither "News for Nerds" and certainly not "Stuff That Matters."
:-)
That being said, I wonder if they deployed tomorrow's MS patches and went boom.
PayPal reports problem. We slashdot them.
I know we hate them and all, but why can't we take just a little bit of sympathy?
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
Paypal has always had a history of problems. If you've ever tried disputing a claim, then you'll know what I mean. Although Paypal makes transactions a LOT easier (and faster) on eBay and other online services, I wouldn't pump large amounts of money into my Paypal balance...It's just too risky! Not to mention that there are lots of people out there running scams by using Paypal who are aware of the fact that many people feel safe because of their "Confirmed User" status. So it doesn't surprise me that they continue to have problems elsewhere...
. . . the FDIC finally figured out it's an unregulated bank and shut it down.
Thats funny, I never had problems with my paypal account. I get emails all the time from them asking me to verify my account at secure websites like paypal.reallysecure.tk. Sometimes they even send me a utility, paypalbuddy.exe, to keep my computer secure. I feel a lot safer since I've installed paypalbuddy.exe, in fact I know that I'm safe because if I check my task manager I can see that paypalbuddy.exe is using 90% of my CPU to constantly encrypt my paypal traffic, even when I'm not at the computer! I forwarded this handy utility to my mother-in-law and she loves it too.
The only thing Paypal should really focus on now is training their likely outsourced software engineers in proper grammar. Samir is constantly sending me emails about my paypal account though for some reason he can never get some english phrases right. I guess its ok though, I cant expect the entire world to speak english, and I give him an E for effort, especially on those unique poems he attaches to the end of the emails...
Shall I share...
Capture the magic of the season,
Sit down, relax, and have trust in us.
The price of portability
upon Real Girls Business?
Thou must medicate thyself.
Credit where credit is due, this spam poetry site rocks
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
They're just getting ready to invoke line 4531 of the service agreement (that thing in the 5 line scrollbar you agreed to) which says that if they seize your account and all the money therein you agree to settle your case through binding arbitration via email.
After listening to the talk, one came away wondering how the site even worked at all. Every day, you are on the bleeding edge and every day if you have the slightest of hiccups, expect to have it covered in the Wall Street Journal the next day.
I don't know what they paid that poor guy, but it isn't enough. I'm surprised he still has all his hair and it wasn't grey.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
Paypal is used for most Ebay transactions, and according to Dick Cheney, Ebay is what's keeping our economy going. I'd say more, but I need to go to the store for canned food, plastic sheeting, and duct tape.
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
for infrastructure services such as PayPal, it is essential that we have competition and choices.
this is a valid use of government regulatory powers: NO MONOPOLIES, EVER
C'mon fellas.
/.
br> Changing over sites does happen occationally, and outages happen!!
I couldn't log onto my Commonwealth Netbank account last night. Maybe I should have put that up on
SESDL = Same ebay s**t different Logo, paypal should give it a rest, between letting people being defrauded to charging you even if you fart while on their site and providing the worse internet application.
There are better options outhere, bidpay, usual western union, post office money orders. if you go with a company that does live updates on PRODUCTION equipment you don't even understand why you are reading stuff out of what might seem to you a TV with a keyboard attached.
It probably happened because this ebay seller was selling bootleg dvds and the FBI seized Paypal's servers :)
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
Paypal is ok for keeping small amounts of money for online purchases, but you need to remember they are not a bank. Do not keep more money in youe Paypal account than you can afford to lose. Your money in Paypal is not backed by the FDIC. That said I still keep small amounts of money in my paypal account.
roamingfeet
By the way, don't trust PayPal's message that the site might be available at any specific time. They've been giving specific times all day today but for the most part, it's inaccessible through any interface... web front-end, payment processing back-end, instant payment notifications, debit cards don't work, etc.
You can read more about the trials and tribulations of this weekend's major outage from a developer's point of view at the PayPal Developer web forum. There are a lot of unhappy campers there!
A service which houses 50 million people, has billions of dollars flow through it, and is the primary payment service for the largest auction site in the world? Sounds pretty newsworthy to me, people.
Regardless, we accept Paypal payments for our business. Didn't work all weekend...and today I kept getting errors (I think it was 30004) telling me to "retry" or "return to main page". Took a few retries, but I did get stuff done....such as transfering money out for payroll on Friday. Auction and storefront sales were down from lack of a payment service though. Debit card had activity over the weekend, so that worked fine.
from the msnbc article:
"When folks go to use their PayPal debit cards, the payment is rejected, but the charge actually goes through and PayPal is deducting the amount from their account"
NEOCA - Custom LED Flashlights
First there's an article about how bad it is to be in IT.
/.'ers.
Then PayPal goes down and it receives national attention followed by an assault on the servers by curious
Yeah... I bet there's at least one IT guy out there who's phone is ringing like made who'd agree being IT really sucks...
8:22pm PDT and still timing out. Maybe there'll be some jobs available soon!!!
Jeremy Logan's Website.
The powered by Sun logo = suckers....
Scott McNealy can go to hell.. why god took Superman instead of this bozo...
Yeah, so paypal.com is having issues loading. Makes sense to slashdot them too!
Any Sys Admin will tell you that extensive testing should be done before going live. I guess we have done our part and "tested" their systems.
BTW, rule #1 is as follows:
#1. Always make sure you can blame someone else when a problem happens. (I'd hate to be the guy who ran the software update!)
This is why real banking institutions have such stringent operational guidelines set down my the federal government in regards to information systems. This should serve as a hearty wake-up call to a great many people that have fallen under the impression that Paypal is a "real" bank, when in fact they are not.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
The remark about MS patches is just blatant flamebait. Never mind that PayPal runs Linux.
G..G..G..Good.
With any luck this is a permanent crash.
... but it's intermittent. Most of the time I just get an error message. After a couple of tries, I was able to reach my account and it looks ok, except for a rather large payment to a bank in Nigeria. Hmm, I don't remember doing that...
I sent an angry email to Paypal after I was also having problems. I don't expect a reply, since PayPal has horrible customer service.
Quick summary
"It is a disturbing that a company who make millions of dollars chose not to hire competent developers for the design of the site and software testers to ensure the site worked before putting it into production"
I'm too lazy to mail a check or money order for something I buy online (online is supposed to = convenient), so when I wanted to buy a lens for my SLR, I didn't bid on the relevant auctions today, since I was not sure I'd have a reliable way to pay for it.
One wonders how much money will be lost by others taking similar actions. Not really quantifiable but definitely some kind of loss.
They've got it fixed now... I just received an email instructing me to re-enter my credit card and bank info because of the recent problems. It looks like it's on a new server in Taiwan too... go figure.
How cheap is that? "* grinds to a halt". Slashdot is supposed to report news, not make the news.
How dare they charge for a usefull service?
That of course has me wondering is what the "powered by IBM" link on every page really means. That's a lot of hardware.
A friend of mine sent me $35 bucks via paypal, it arrived.. Then the other day I checked my account and it was EMPTY. I have not bought anything with paypal in the last month, so where did my balance go?
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
1) As soon as someone pays you, move ALL the money out of your PayPal account.
2) To pay someone else, have payment go directly from your associated checking account. There is no need to carry a positive balance on PayPal.
3) Don't get the goddamn DEBIT card.
BTW, it's 8:37PT and it took almost 3 minutes to sign on. My guess is that PayPal will be hiring soon.
Hmmm, I wonder what hardware/software they use, and I wonder why no one's bashing it.
...that we really need a viable alternative to Paypal to be adopted for use in places like Ebay. At first today I was semi-annoyed at my inability to pay for an auction I had won, but after a few other people told me the issue was widespread I started thinking how much it must have made a sucky impact on a lot of small ebay-based businesses, etc today, and what a prolonged problem could mean. Seriously, I would love to see an independent company not owned by ebay as a secondary (and widely accepted) alternative to Paypal. I figure that competition can only breed improvement anyhow. For any of the more involved readers our there, what is the next best alternative to Paypal?
Granted, I've only had two disputes over 4 years or so. Both were people on eBay who took the money and didn't deliver anything. But both times, Paypal investigated the claims. And both times, they found the seller responsible and refunded my money, in full, with no fees taken. Of course, the downside is that it took them about a month to complete the entire process, from the original claim to the refund. But hey, I didn't lose a cent.
You do have to watch out for trading items in online games though. Paypal makes it clear they do not offer any protection for "intangible" items. In this case it's the buyer that has to watch out the most. If you buy something and send the money, and then the person never gives you the item, you're screwed. Paypal will investigate if you file a claim, but as long as the seller claims they delivered it, Paypal will just tell you it was intangible and that will be that.
I agree with the parent post, though, that you shouldn't leave lots of money in your Paypal balance. Paypal is not a bank. If you receive a lot of money through Paypal, best to send it directly to your bank account ASAP. It's not like you need to have money in your Paypal balance to send instant payments anyway.
Collect $200?
sig not found
Right on man, just one other thing to think about here. A lot of the n00b sellers only accept paypal, and they're going to be screwing people with negative feedback. I can't wait for sellers to start taking down "I prefer paypal" logos from their auctions.
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
is because we just slashdotted it?
As soon as I heard ebay had acquired them, I thought "Oh boy, I sure hope ebay doesn't get involved in the technical side of running paypal".
Apparently they have.
... me. The owner had noticed earlier that our paypal transactions notices seemed unusually low. I went and investigated and noticed the same thing. I though, "what the hell is going on?" I didn't even need to investigate our software for errors because as soon as i went to paypal's site to log in it was obvious to me that they were having problems. My only question is, what the hell are these guy's doing? You cannot have this kind of downtime when you're the major medium of the majority of the US currency on the internet! I did a brief google to see if anyone else had information on this since obviously paypal didn't have the decency to put up a message on their site outside of the usual error but found nothing (until now). Maybe I didn't search hard enough. Anyways, this is the first time I've been really angry at paypal. I've got many friends who've had accounts locked and had problems with paypal but this has been my first problem with them and it's not a small one. It looks like their IPN system is messed up too. I'm getting emails from paypal that the transactions are happening but the IPN system is rejecting them. Hurray! I can't wait to do them all manually and also answer all the emails from people who wondering why their paypal transaction never purchased their item. I am very dissapointed!
The message was that they were performing maintenance until 12PM PDT.
This guy is way out there
Just completed paying for something I've been trying to pay all day.
Debit cards are for wusses and winos.
http://www.paypalsucks.com gives testimony of some pay pal horror stories.
For all the fees and bullshit you have to deal with, it hardly seems worth it.
who's software would paypal use at the core that doles out monthly updates?
Well duh, of course it's having problems. Slashdot writes "Website X grinds to a halt" and in seconds, it becomes true. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. ;-)
It was announced recently that N Korea has trained crackers. N Korea set off a small nuke a few weeks ago to show off. US troops have pulled out from S Korea. Japan has the go ahead for their 'preemptive' strike.
Paypal goes down. My bank was down for a bit. Walgreens employment computer system is down. Ebaumsworld.com (an unimportant webpage) goes down.
Obviously Korean axis of evil crackers are striking our most important computer systems.
or
Global warming is coming.
Nice to know that if there's a problem, they have someone to go to vs. a 14-Lunix hax0r who tells them to RTFM.
That's the one I used with my sales revenue from off of eBay...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Though a lot of posts on here are along the lines of "see...haha...paypal is not a bank!!" I for one am grateful that it isn't.
There are a lot of people, for a variety of reasons, who have been screwed out of getting a bank account from a regular bank. Because of negative reporting on chex systems, they can't get a regular checking account at all.
In tandem with a savings account (which you *can* sometimes get even with a bad chexsystems report) and a paypal account, you have essentially the same services of a checking account.
I for one got screwed by my bank (5/3rd) after fraud hit my account and they refused to take responsibility for some items. Thanks to paypal I still can have checking account like abilities until I sue my bank.
Like most big companies they don't want to admit a script kiddie with some big as zombienet has taken their ass out when they took down his site or banned his account because of one scam or another.
PayPal is slow right now, almost as if a gaggle of geeks where checking to see if it realy was down. However, everything seems to be working.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
According to a quick telnet...
I hope that isn't true. That release is 2 years old. As per Apache's web site: "We consider Apache 1.3.31 to be the best version of Apache 1.3 available and we strongly recommend that users of older versions, especially of the 1.1.x and 1.2.x family, upgrade as soon as possible."
See: http://www.apache.org/dist/httpd/Announcement.html
In the US, New York State and Louisiana have imposed some regulatory requirements on PayPal.
If you lost money with Paypal between 1999 and 2003, there's a class action settlement.
And software. eBay runs on Websphere AFAIK.
class action settlement == pittance for you && windfall for lawyers.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
One of my friends has interviewed at PayPal and Ebay for the SCM and Build Engineer role. Because of the merger, he interviewed with the same technical lead twice.
A famous question is
"How do you remove all of the directories named "TEST" from the repository?"
Understanding best practices, the answer has always been
"Can't we just hide them, version control is there for a reason?"
The head of their team then explained
"No, who would name anything TEST that they wanted to need"
For the record he clarified that the job entails removing versions and files.
Its clear that best practice at Ebay/PayPal is to fly by the seat of your pants and hope it works. We all see how well that works now.
eBay doesn't seem to have learned anything from these debacles, and continues to roll out unnecessary updates with inadequate testing, resulting in previously solid functionality breaking down. Whoever is in charge of update testing over there should be sacked.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Since it doesn't happen all the time, I can handle a temporary outage... I mean, slashdot has built up my tolerance to the phenomenom anyway...
You need a FREE iPod Nano
www.paypalsucks.com has a lot of information if anyone is wanting to look at it. Their forum has links and crap about what's going on right now with this Paypal deal.
I was finally able to send money about 30 minutes ago, but now I have several people sending me money orders I do not want. Bah! I hate Paypal.
I was just submitting a payment to a developer on Pay Pal, the logging in took forever, so I jump over here to kill the time.
http://www.paypal.com/en_US/i/logo/logo_Sun.gif "Powered by Sun Microsystems"
After the way they've ALWAYS treated their customers, and now have banned so many of us for conducting legitimate business they think isn't up to their standards, I hope they stay down. Maybe everyday users will get a clue and start looking elsewhere.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
1-888-221-1161
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
That's why people make rollback plans. If I had the budget of paypay I'd have my new sun servers ready, points my VIPs to the new sun servers and if everything goes to hell, go back to the old VIPs and back to the drawing board.
:)
Psh.. amateurs
Yes, I am a smart ass; it's better than the alternative.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yet another reason this unregulated global banking monopoly has to get some competition, immediately. The ecommerce world cannot afford to rely on this single point of failure, either accidentally or at their discretion.
--
make install -not war
... doesn't meet all MY requirements.
that is the most amazing post ever in the histroy of slashdot
http://www.DaveNet.biz/
But of course, if it goes down it will go down on Friday evening when sysadm is taking an "out of reach trip" to see the beautiful foliage along with other techies...
On the second thought, they were asking for trouble by making an update on Thrusday. My rule of thumb is to schedule all production updates on Tuesday and in case of slippage beyond Wednesday it should be moved to the next week.
Oh well, I guess they know better (hmm, maybe not)...
"You mortals are so obtuse." -Q
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned it. But I recall, most large operations, having an "undo" plan of action, so if the upgrade fails, or has problems, there's a way to migrate back down to the software you were running before.
It would make more sense to rollback, regain reliable service, and re-test the failed upgrade on their internal test network.
Eagerly await the follow up commentary from I, Cringely.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
"DAMN YOU, SERVICE PACK 2!"
That's for anyone who was interested in what they use specifically.
:)
Gotta love the = key in a Lynx browser.
So, mebbe they went back to their old page or something but the one I loaded as of this time says "Powered by IBM".
There is a Sun logo at the bottom of the screen alongside those of other IT behemomoths such as Burger King and Toyota though.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
For those who say "if its already slow, dont slashdot it!", seems you over estimate the slashdot effect. Slashdot links may take a normal web host down, but anyone with an infrastructure built to serve a lot of traffic shouldn't even notice it.
A site I run has been linked by Slashdot many times - aside from the number of referrals in web logs and perhaps a few mbit spike in traffic, you wouldn't know it even occured.
PayPal is having much larger issues. I've experienced the same types of problems when doing larger upgrades - it's usually a single piece of code that went unchecked, and the odd user(s) that actually get caught in an untested (or improperly tested) segment of code are throwing the system for a loop.
Or, just bad performance planning. I'm not surprised - these things have to happen every now and then, they're quite unavoidable when you're dealing with often changes to an infrastructure with that many _DYNAMIC_ users, and so much _DYNAMIC_ data.
Regardless, it's a growing pain. I've been through a few of these on a 150 GB database with 2 MM users and 15 servers. PayPal is a lot larger, and they surely have much more difficult problems. Hell, if they have to do something such as change the way a single piece of data is stored, that means a lot of downtime (or slowtime) processing!
I'm sure they'll sort it out, unfortunately lots of people are losing lots of business in the process.
Is anyone else profoundly bothered by this?
PayPal, which must deal handle millions of dollars a day, just goes down entirely. My real problem, though, is that they are not a real bank. (At least last time I checked) they are not FDIC Insured or anything. They could just never come back, and there's really not much anyone could do.
Not that I expect them to run off with my money. But in situations such as, say, the whole site going down, I like to know my money's in something that's insured.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
It's not a bank, people!
Others have said similar, I merely divert your attention to http://www.paypalsucks.com/....
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
PayPal grinds YOU to a halt!
The site is faster now, but the new page is still up. My suggestion is to refresh your browser. If it's still showing the old home page, then PayPal may just be rolling out the new site selectively to certain areas. It all seems to fit my theory, anyway.
Also, from the new front page:
Site Update
A technical problem has caused intermittent availability for members attempting to use the site. Activities such as accessing account information, paying for ended eBay listings, and using PayPal shipping functionality have been intermittently available. PayPal is continuing to work to resolve these issues. We understand the inconvenience this issue has caused for some members, and we appreciate your patience.
There is a Sun logo at the bottom of the screen alongside those of other IT behemomoths such as Burger King and Toyota though.
??? Burger King and Toyota? Are you jokingly referring to the TrustE and BBB logos?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
My luck never fails me. Today I ran out of clicks, hits, or whatever Slashdot calls there subscription "points". I also ran out on another website I "subscribe" to so I figured kill two birds with one stone.
So what do I do, I re-subscribe through paypal today and I did notice it was going a tad slow, but I didn't worry too much.
To be honest I thought it was a recent FW upgrade on my router I did the night before acting up. I reflashed back a version and everything seemed ok.
Anyways the issue: I was wondering why my subscription to Slashdot still wasn't showing up. My other subscription was paid within the same minute as the slashdot one, and it went through fine. Weird. As of 9:55pm PST it still hasn't "gone through" (BTW I am confident that it will be fixed and I know it's not Slashdot's fault)
After finding out about the problem, I can only wonder if the Slashdot payment will even go through. My real concern is my bank account being screwed up, I don't want to be billed for $5 in an endless loop.
~Your Friendly Neighborhood Anime Man
Divert out attention there, yes, just like everyone else and their mother already has..
wow, thanks. i try. I wish there was an easy way to save slashdot comments to a fav comment bin or something, I'm sure I've lost a ton of uncontrollable laughter posts over the years.
Money you don't want? What are you, INSANE?!!
'If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit.'
it would seem your site has recently been hacked.
This is why real LAN institutions have such stringent operational guidelines set down by the federal government of geeks in regards to information systems. This should serve as a hearty wake-up call to a great many people that have fallen under the impression that your site is a "real" LAN institution, when in fact it is not.
This is insanely poor logic. I don't deny, for a moment, that he has an amount of data that far exceeds anything I can fathom, but the idea that he's somehow alone in this is ludicrous.
What about military programs that move this kind of data? What about research programs that move this kind of data? Air traffic control systems?
Or, more to the point, what about the hundreds of REAL financial institutions that support online wire transfers, etc, etc, that DON'T have these problems.
I don't deny that they have a hard job, but pretending that they are somehow the only ones who to deal with the amount of uptime and data as they do is just factually wrong.
OK, it's not like I've used many of these (o.k., just e-gold). Also, they don't have a O'Reilly hacks title dedicated to them:
iKobo, Epassporte, e-gold, authorize.net, Yahoo! PayDirect, 2Checkout, iBill, Kagi, ClickBank, DigiBuy, VeriSign Payflow Pro® and Payflow Link®, Affero, BTClick&Buy, CCAvenue, CCBill, CCNow, ClickBank, DigiBuy, DigitalCandle, FastPay, ImagineNation, InstaBill, Jettis, Kagi, MembershipPlus, Moneybookers, MultiCards, MyPaySystems, NoChex, PartyKey, Pay-Line, Paymate, Process54, ProPay, Reg.Net, RegNow, RegSoft, Share*It, StormPay, SWREG, V-Share, Verotel, VolPay
please, read the fine print.
Are you referring to the "let ebay host your item photo" stuff? cause I haven't been able to get it to work either. No, I will not install IE on my Mac. I thought it was a recent browser update that was causing it since I use recent nightlies but I updated again recently and the damn thing still does not work.
"There was an error in your input..."
Fuck that. It was working FINE last month on the SAME BROWSER! (Firefox).
i am a soviet space shuttle
Bank of America's Merchant Services website had some serious problems the week of 9/20/2004.
They have what they call a "virtual terminal", it's a web form where you can manually type in an order rathen then have the order be inputted though your company's website. This form is supposed to check order id, credit card number, customer name, etc to see if you are accidently duplicating orders.
Well, that monday the terminal decided that every order put through where the cc# matched a previous order was a duplicate even if the order id was different. That means if I had any returning customes BofA refused to process the order!
I rigged out my own form that passed the info thourgh their credit card gateway stuff to get around this problem, but there is no way you can say real banks never have any problems.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
Went to a Wawa (it's a Philly area convenience store) to buy a sandwich for me and my wife. Total was $11, I have $15 in the account from an eBay auction I sold last week.
Selected debit- transaction denied. Selected debit again- transaction denied. Selected credit- this time it went through. (Otherwise I was just going to pay cash.)
When I checked my account when I got home, the balance was negative- they double-debited the transaction.
Now, I'm not worried- even my bank has made an error or two like this, and a call to customer service tomorrow should clear things up. And even if it doesn't, it's $11.
But I do feel very bad tonight for people depending on the money in that account. They're in a lot of trouble tonight.
BTW, PayPal and eBay are part of the same conglomeration -- wonder if eBay is going to have a similar transition?
Of course, these services are all inferior to PayPal because of the exorbant fees that each charges. Useful in a pinch, but if Paypal disappeared, I would wager that most merchants would choose to set up a merchant account directly with CC companies, and avoid the extra cost. The convenience just isn't worth it.
....I guess installing SP2 for WinXP was a mistake after all!
PGA
I think this sort of problem was one of the major issues in the class-action lawsuit that PayPal is in the process of settling now (it was litigated this summer).
I'm not sure if your problems were in the right timeframe, but this probably applies to *someone* reading this.
Check here to see if it applies to you.
This morning I withdrew my $4.81 so I could get a pack of smokes and a cup-o-noodle.
Guess they were depending on me to pay their internet bill!
Cool! Amazing Toys.
It says "Your information is kept secure." In fact, they keep it so secure, you can't even access it yourself.
Here's the secret to immortality:
Site Update
A technical problem has caused intermittent availability for members attempting to use the site. Activities such as accessing account information, paying for ended eBay listings, and using PayPal shipping functionality have been intermittently available. PayPal is continuing to work to resolve these issues. We understand the inconvenience this issue has caused for some members, and we appreciate your patience.
as for exactly what this means is up for debate.
-me
-- Hail Eris
And this will be different how?
PayPal has chosen Sun Microsystems to help run its global online payment solution system, making it one of the most secure and dynamic technology platforms in the world. By integrating Sun's Solaris(TM) Operating System, along with Sun's hardware infrastructure, PayPal offers over 50 million members in 45 countries one of the world's safest and most reliable real-time payment solutions.
Really?
"WE, OUR PARENT, SUBSIDIARIES, EMPLOYEES AND OUR SUPPLIERS SPECIFICALLY DISCLAIM ANY IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF TITLE, MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT."
So they say that they are unfit for any purpose. Reading their TOS it really surprises me that people have any sort of trust in this company. They go on to say, in not so many words, tough shit if anything goes wrong, even if it is due to our negligence. Pretty much sums up what is going on now. It also says that some states their claims of non-liability are void. Can any armchair lawyers out there (and I know you're out there...) know what states these are and how this might be applied to a lawsuit in the future for this cock-up?
today is spelling optional day.
If you use their money market account option, your money isn't insured... but if you just have a regular PayPal balance, it actually is FDIC insured... in a way. Basically, they keep your money in a pooled account in a real bank, and you get "pass-through" FDIC insurance because of that, up to $100K.
They explain this in detail in a link off the homepage.
It's not as good as putting your money in a bank (because your protection in case of PayPal's insolvency doesn't seem totally assured, just in the case of the *bank's* insolvency), but it's not totally unprotected.
All of the institutions you refer to are called slow and static by the folks in the Silly Valley.
If you don't slow down for process, you sure look faster!!
No we cannot. Do not pass go, do not collect the $200 that a 12-year-old from Bumhump, New Jersey owes you.
"No beer until you finish your tequila!" -Leela's Dad
There are two primary issues that banks deal with:
1) a large amount of data
2) a high volume of transactions
PayPal and eBay have the pleasure of dealing with a third:
3) highly versatile users with demanding needs, to both points #1 and #2.
And being a system that requires transactional integrity, you can add a fourth:
4) ACID compliant, highly relational database with proper locking, even on SELECT. NOT MYSQL.
#1 or #2 = very easily managed
#1 + #2 = get a good DBA
#1 + #2 + #3 = good DBA, good infrastructure
#1 + #2 + #3 + #4 = fackin gridlock
This is something that _WAS_ very rare until recently, and is only now becoming more prevalent, with the adoption of more data-oriented websites, more overall users, and them being more demanding.
I have the pleasure of working in a similar (although significantly smaller, though still "big") environment that fits these conditions. It's incredibly difficult to make a very large transaction based, highly-relational data set accessible to many (>500K) users at a time. Anyone who says otherwise hasn't had to do it.
500k users?
Think about all of the people who just did online banking or ATM transactions in the past minute.
Now, rethink your post.
in soviet russia, you go down on paypal.
scott king
Why don't you just use a flat-file ascii database stored on a floppy disk?
Like what I said? You might like my music
if you blow your credit _really_ badly (ex., if you're a man and you divorice a woman), you're probably screwed for the next 10 years. So much so that you get stuck with services like paypal for a debit/credit card. What paypal's doing (and what they've always done) is take advange of people who aren't in a position to use a normal, legitimate business. This is why they get away with the shit they do. If you're using paypay, you probably don't have a heck of a lot of (better) alternatives.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I just read the "Jobs at PayPal" page... Some of the more interesting new openings that have been updated today:
:)
Director, Software Infrastructure Architecture
Senior Software QA Engineer
Staff Software Engineer
Sounds to me like they're cleaning house after this one
bash: rtfm: command not found
I heard a news item the other day on the radio that banks all around the country are about to begin using a new system for verification of checks and that customers could no longer count on 'floating' of check for two or three days. I'd be willing to bet PayPal was upgrading their software to support this. It's estimated this change will put $2 billion more into the banking industry each year, largely in the form of fees on bounced checks and overdraft charges. There may be more such failures in the next few weeks.
These people looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
Websystem of any major retail bank does this without any problems.
Millions of users - check;
Transactional integrity - check;
Real-time access with ability to post transactions - check;
Everything always needing to be 100% correct - check.
of complete and utter conmen.
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I feel a lot safer since I've installed paypalbuddy.exe, in fact I know that I'm safe because if I check my task manager I can see that paypalbuddy.exe is using 90% of my CPU to constantly encrypt my paypal traffic, even when I'm not at the computer! I forwarded this handy utility to my mother-in-law and she loves it too.
Interesting. I also forwarded to my mother-in-law, although I did not install it locally...
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
That when I tried to withdrawl funds from my paypal into my bank account, I couldn't change the drop down box that lets you choose which account you want to put the funds in. It always reverted to the default no matter what. I had to change my default account # to make the transfer. Hopefully this will also be addressed. I'm just glad I'm not alone in my paypal troubles. /. is the greatest for making me feel better in my misery.
The Property of One's : "The Oneitude is directly proportional to the Colditude of the one." - S.B.
Read all about it here
The site that scared me enough to take all my money out of paypal and never use it again. They're not a real bank and they're not held up to the same standard as real banks. Just read some of the horror stories in their forums.
--Smutt
The Information Revolution will be fought on the command line.
The "user systems" and associated features of these bank sites have nowheres near the relational properties of something like PayPal - it's not even close. They can segregate data based on customer sets, where you know where users are coming from, and you can tie them to their own set of data - data that can be archived and summarized into non-realtime aggregates.
PayPal has the task of linking transactions between users, and allowing users to create modifications or additions to them in real time.
These are not the same, by any stretch. It's the final bit of difference that makes it so much more complex.
While I'm at it, I'll compare this apple, and this orange...
You obviously don't understand the difference between PayPal and a bank, yet still feel compelled to preach about it - which is typical of the normal Slashdot visitor I suppose. I guess I shouldn't have commented on something that I actually have experience with.
When you have dealt with such a system, I'll give two and a half shits about your suggestion to "re-think my post".
I make an online transfer payment to another customer's account. As soon as I enter the transaction, the customer can see online his account balance update and the transaction that I added - how is it different ? Transactions usually involve different users, and they must be added realtime, and the volumes of an international bank with tens of million customers are very much comparable eith paypal. A bank's datastore is always fully ACID, and relational - even the old systems that use database 'engines' from the 1970'ies have that full functionality in the banking system, because, well, they are the ones that needed it before anyone else in the information industry. All the stuff that banking systems use to optimise things and do it effectively can be used by Paypal - I see no real, reasonable excuses.
You see, PayPal sucks and all that (what with them freezing accounts all over the place), but what are the alternatives?
Really. For an individual or small business, you don't want high setup or monthly fees, and if you look in that league, who can beat PayPal in terms of transaction fees and ease of use?
I'd genuinly like to know.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Erm, go stay in yer own trailer park.
The GP post referred to *sending* money with Western Union, for which they do charge a very hefty fee.
That should not, of course, be confused with buying a money order from them, which of course is completely different.
Perhaps the parent should check the net before... ahh, nebbermind, hillbilly.
The last fucking thing you want is my undivided attention...
Wonder when paypal will allow withdrawals to banks in India ?
Chris ,
Php Programmers.
One of the payment methods we accept is Paypal. I have been receiving complaints about problems with people paying since Friday. I verified it myself today just to be sure, as most "paypal errors" reported by users turn out to be user errors.
paintball
I bet there will be a *massive* surge in phishing scams over the next few weeks. If I had a rather more suspicious turn of mind, I'd suggest that they may have been DDOSed...
Paypal isn't exactly known as the most reliable company. But are there any better alternatives out there, that have a good reputation? Are there any similar companies that also accept money from Asia countries (such as Malaysia and Phillippines), and don't charge $30 to transfer to an international bank account (I live in Europe, not US)?
fuck paypal
1) You should always have a detailed rollback plan. This should include what you monitor during the change, what triggers the rollback and who is responsible for making that decision
2) You should have a rollback plan for any change to a live site which deals with transactions no matter how 'small' the site is
The problem these days is the complex interaction between different systems and user traffic means there is no guarantee of a flawless rollout even with a full staging system to test on. I have seen failures occuring due to a unique combination of user requests creating a thread contention which results in an instability causing failure up to 1/2 an hour later!
There is a gap for a system which can capture the entire network traffic being applied to a system and replay it against a staging environment to catch just this sort of problem.
The other problem is a 'minor' problem during rollout such as intermittant failure of some parts. This is let go for a while and people start throwing hacks at the problem. Before you know it enought new transactions have been applied to the system to make rollback unviable.
In my opinion with complex web based systems testing and rollout is becoming one of the most interesting areas in IT at the moment
In Canada a woman can divorce a woman also!
Paypal recently relocated their stuff to Omaha, Nebraska. Why Omaha? Something like 60% of all VISA/MC transactions pass through First Data's bunker at 72nd and Pacific and a good portion of the other 40% goes through First National Bank's facilities downtown.
A fellow who used to work for me spent less than three months at Paypal as a Windows server admin. I forget the exact details but he said they wanted him to complete something like thirty projects a quarter and his impression was that eight projects of the sort they were asking would be a reasonable schedule.
I have heard that Paypal is pretty much a madhouse. Omaha isn't big enough to have a huge pool of IT talent and if they're grinding people into the dirt word will get around quickly. I predict you'll see lots of monster.com job posts for them as they poison their reputation here.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
I do not do business with anyone who cares about customer security and such so little as to exclusively use PayPal. Can you measure the accumulated losses of offering no alternative? Thinking outside the box would be offering more-reasonable alternatives.
This is the "Check Clearing for the 21st Century Act", commonly known as "Check 21". Basically it allows a bank anywhere along the path from where the check is first deposited, to its arrival for payment at your bank, to replace the paper check with a front and back image scan. The law provides that your copy of this substituted check must be treated like an original check for the purpose of things like using it as a receipt to show you paid. For example, if your landlord failed to record the fact that you paid the rent, but deposited your check anyway, the law requires this substitute check image (printed back to you by your bank) be accepted as proof the check was deposited just as the original would be.
Banks are not required to do the image scan of checks, but they are allowed to do so. Banks are required to accept the image scan in place of those checks when the image scan gets done. If PayPal is allowing you to write checks against your account (but they would BE a bank if this happens, I'd think), they would have to update their software by October 28 to comply. More likely, if "Check 21" is an issue here, is that they may be adding some software to allow them to image scan checks made as payment to them. But the more they do like this, the closer they become to being a real bank.
When an image scan is done, the check can be processed much faster because it can now be sent to the account holder bank electronically. This is where the "float" many people depend on can start to disappear. OTOH, your bank may be able to get funds into your account for checks paid to you that you deposit equally faster. There is a possibility that PayPal was doing things that depend on the "float". Many business and people have been doing that for years. Practices will now have to change.
For more information:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
I called paypal customer service last week complaining about the REALLY poor performance of the site. The wonderfully helpful DOLT on the other end said that the site gets really busy during the weekend and that slows things down.
Bullsh*t.
How can Ebay build a site that handles millions of transactions, and has great uptime and speed, yet their subsidiary - suck so bad?
-ted
Nice advertisement for PayPal. They're constantly down, or under construction, or have notices up that it cannot be accessed for a short time.
How does this make front page news for PayPal?
I'll take those money orders off your hands!
SIGFAULT
They discovered they can rape a little more money out you and invade your bank accounts by feigning yet another problem. Paypal is evil.
of course this doesnt help the site much when its being slashdotted in the process. well we shall see if their freshly rebooted servers can crash again.
Lizard "Never let them set limits on your mind!"
This is not intended as a troll - but honestly - go get a real merchant account.
are you nuts?? you can buy prepaid credit cards anywhere. hell the local gas station sells them for $5.00 + the balance you want to put on that visa.
you can then online, by phone, or at most any ATM put money on the card.
works great and nobody can screw you out of more than what you have on the card.
there are thousands of prepaid visa cards out there.
send them $$$ and that $$$ appears on the card.
try a google search for "prepaid visa"
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Don't make multiple huge changes at once. It makes it hard to troubleshoot when the feces hit the rotating blades. Doing monthly patching at the same time you are doing changes to the site flow is asking for this sort of thing.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
I'm sorry to have to admit that this is all my fault. After having a paypal account for 3 years, I finally *received* a payment for the first time over the weekend.
:-\
You can obviously see the result. I only regret that my karma had to affect the rest of you
1. write ultra-scalable jsp application
2. It is too slow. Add a separate database server.
3. Still to slow. Add several http web application servers.
4. Add synchronization talk between web application servers to make sure no two different servers talk to one customer.
5. Add synchronization talk between database servers to make sure they all use the same database.
6. Release to public.
7. Something doesn't work. Switch on debug output and logging to full level.
8. Watch as all servers talk to each other over the underdimensioned intranet connections:
"Hey buddy, I feel so bad, so much load could you do this for me?"
"I'm sorry I've got too much work myself, but here, have some debug output."
9. Watch the intrusion detection system randomly switch off nodes because they showed unnormal traffic patterns.
10. get mentioned on slashdot. There's no such thing as bad publicity!
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
Nice to see that the Malda SDLC is alive and well: "Damn testing, roll it to production now!"
At least they're not getting the /. 503 errors like here.
Don't ever keep money that you really need access to in a Paypal account! Tie the Paypal account to a secondary checking account at your regular bank. No overdraft protection on that secondary one. Regularly transfer money from Paypal into that secondary account, then go to your bank's online interface and transfer it from the secondary checking to the primary one.
fencepost
just a little off
So is it cloudy or something? Why would they go to solar power?
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Works a lot better when I use https://www.paypal.com - in fact, I can't get http://www.paypal.com to load at all, but the secure version comes up fine.
Bankruptcy is pretty much a complete joke in the US. I filed back in the spring of 98. By the end of the summer, I had credit cards again; the interest rates on both were around 18%. The credit limits were small - around $300 - but within 2 years I had ones with $2,000 limits. Around 2000, I bought a new car and zero problem getting financing. I was afraid I was going to get totally screwed on the interest rate, I ended up getting like 6%. The following year I bought a house and, again, had no trouble getting the loan. The bankruptcy wasn't even an issue. I don't remember the interest rate on that, but it wasn't very high -- something like 5% on a 30 year with no money down. Granted, my mortgage was a VA loan, but that in way guarantees that the lender will give you a loan, it just guarantees that they will get a (small) portion back if you default. Last year I bought a new car and again got financing with no problems, this time with a rate of about 4%. So far, the only problem my bankruptcy has caused me is that Best Buy wouldn't give me a credit card when I applied for one a year ago.
Oh --- debit cards don't help you credit score. Neither does pushing the "credit" button rather than the "debit" button when you pay with a debit card. They are NOT credit cards and do not go on your credit history. The only (real) difference is how they are treated when they are processed. I think, and I could be wrong about this, if you select "credit", then the credit card companies make money off of your transaction.
It will be difficult to know when it is fixed because there will probably be a run on paypal accounts. They may keep it slow for this reason. I am sure anyone with a few hundred dollars in paypal will move their money out as fast as they can. Kind of like a "slashdoting a bank"
HPC for Primates. Read Cluster Monkey
Sure enough, I went to "My eBay" at eBay this morning to look at the auctions I'm in the middle of, and I get a page full of red text -- some(!) of my information is not available.
Sometimes computers make it easy for us to stay poor, sometimes they make it more challenging, but I'm sure that we'll keep finding ways to increase our efficiency one way or the other until we completely run out of money.
On the 10:th this month I happened upon jinx.com, courtesy of a slashdot discussion. Decided I wanted some t-shirts. Said and done, I started to place my order, just to find out that I had to use PayPal to pay for it because, horrors of horrors, I'm not an USian. If you're not an USian, then you don't get to pay using your VISA directly (anyone can tell me why? I thought this shit was global). Anyhow...
I've resisted PayPal until now, partly because of all the stories, partly because I understand that they're not a bank and wield a huge one-sided "EULA" to which I don't want to sign away my soul in blood. I don't want the drama, I don't want the redundancy -- I can pay perfectly fine using my normal internet BANK, thank you very much.
That is, I always could, until stores decided that PayPal was teh gr3atest evah! and denied my all other choices.
But damnit, I want those t-shirts. So I sign up. I get time-out's like crazy, having to retry page after page (which gets tedious after a while). Think "people put up with this shit? It's worse than I imagined!".
So, with some trepidation, I add my debit to the system. "When this is done, I hope I can erase it from their database", I think to myself.
I finally pay jinx. PayPal says "All OK!". I go to sleep.
In the morning, I check my bank. Sure enough, the funds been reserved. Check Jinx. "Awaiting payment". Hmm... "Well I hope it's drawn soon"
Loiter around, hoping my t-shirts will ship soon. I've got someones birthday to attend in just over a week, and I really need some fresh wear.
Today, two days later. Money still reserved at my bank. Jinx still "Awaiting payment". Unable to log into PayPal, but my account at PayPal said "all paid up, not problems here, no sireee" (paraphrasing) when I left them last time, so why would that change suddenly.
So, now what? Wait around?
Gawd damnedit. I just wanted my fucking t-shirts.
And that my friends, is my very first PayPal-story.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I chucked Paypal not long after the first of the year. Basically, I think they are an Ebay-only payment system, and Ebay is too large to be managable.
So, I switched over to Yowcow.
Based out of Australia, it's a fair decent site.
With most banks over here, if you make a transfer/web payment, it is only transferred overnight - and that is if it's an account in the same bank. Antother bank and you are talking around three days. Another EU county and it is longer still.
had to run it as credit and it went through...
Anyone have a mirror? There are lots of alternate sites that used to allow me to log on to my Paypal account before anytime they'd email me about account problems.
I noticed they've added a powered by sun graphic at the bottom of their page, which is loading INCREDIBLY slowly.
Coincidence, or did the sun manage to melt them, putting the bomb in dot com?
caused the problem?
This morning I withdrew my $4.81 so I could get a pack of smokes and a cup-o-noodle.
Unbelievable, but if you want to kill yourself that's your problem.
Those cup-o-noodle things are evil.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
So I go to conduct a transfer, and lo: paypal is down. So I head over to slashdot, to find hundreds of posts on the subject. Long live /.
Please click this link, http://www.mindwarp.net/steal_your_information, to verify your paypal account information due to the server upgrade.
Thanks,
Paypal
a call to customer service tomorrow should clear things up
Have you tried looking for a customer service number on their site? Once it's back up, I dare you to find one..
The truth about Scientology, Xenu, and you: Operation Clambake
I've had a number of online banks in the past, there is not one that has not had an outage at some point or another - even regular Sunday night outages in some cases.
PayPal in my mind has a better track record than most real banks I've used! As you say, they have to, but they also will not be penalized much for a small glitch like this.
They also have the advantage that there is NOTHING else like PayPal. I've looked at other options and there are none. So where are you gonna go? I've tried two auctions in the past that tried to use non-PayPay payments, and all I can say is - never again.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Didn't your parents teach you any common sense? You're making thousand dollar deals through the internet with someone you don't know with a company called paypal. Smack yourself. Smack yourself again.
2.5, move money from associated account to a second account PayPal has no automated links to. Then they cannot withdraw money out without cause.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You know, I hear this a lot, even from people with the same debit card I carry. I often hear it after I tell a cashier to treat it as a credit card, from someone who's looking at me like I'm a fool who's just parted with his money.
It may be that Visa gets some money, but I don't care. It doesn't come out of my pocket.
So sayeth my bank.
Clearly you have to avoid at all cost a [Bank error in your favor collect $200] card. I mean they had to choose between potentially loosing money if the order goes through or taking the customer's money anyway, I think PayPal chose wisely. Some of those customers won't even complain!
good stuff.
I appeal to the wisdom of fellow
Credit processing costs an additional transaction cost (3 or 5%?). Debit doesn't.
>You know, I hear this a lot, even from people with the same debit card I carry. I often hear it after I tell a cashier to treat it as a credit card, from someone who's looking at me like I'm a fool who's just parted with his money.
Yeah, people think that putting in their PIN is somehow better. I don't understand why.
A dual debit/credit card (basically an ATM card with a Visa/MC logo on it) can be used in one of those ways:
Debit/ATM = You type in a PIN, the money comes out of the account instantly, no signing anything.
-Pros: It talks over the ATM network and will get rejected if you lack funds in your account.
-Cons: Bank treats it like any other ATM transaction, and can charge you for using an "outside" ATM possibly. Also the merchant can tack on fees if they want. Can't overdraw your account, as the funds check is real time.
Credit = You sign a piece of paper (sometimes.. it's not always needed any more), it works like any other credit card.
-Pros: No extra fees can be tacked on to your purchase. Not by the bank, not by the merchant. A percentage may go to a credit company, but that's not costing you anything extra.
-Cons: You have to sign a piece of paper (maybe). The funds are not instantly removed from your account (can take a day or two, as it goes through a credit clearinghouse like all credit transactions). You may find that your bank is stupid and treats the account in a double jeopardy situation (all credit transactions consist of one transaction to verify the money is there and reserve it, and another to actually do the charge.. banks tend to not remove the reserved charges immediately, meaning that though the funds got removed, the same amount of funds may not be available for a few days after the actual transaction happens.. double the money is not available, in other words.. This won't cause any extra charges though, just unavailable funds). Also since credit goes through a third party, the credit check isn't entirely real time, and you can overdraw your account without getting a rejection in some cases.
Basically, assuming you have lots of funds available in the account and don't mind signing a piece of paper, credit is the better choice. No extra charges are possible that way. If you need a real time check of the account or just don't want to sign anything, and don't mind possible extra charges, ATM/Debit is the way to go.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I work for a company that deals in computers, monitors, fax machines, printers, speakers, etc... from role outs. the majority of our bus. is done over the internet and we sell a lot of things on ebay. i handle shipping and all of the used computers that come in. On an everage day i handle between 20 and 40 orders. today? 0 as was the case yesterday. there is always more work to be done (we just got in about 200 PIII 933 hp vectras that i have to go through) but it has definatley slowed things down
We seldom regret saying too little but often regret saying too much.
The actual name of the bank he's talking about is "Fifth Third Bank" and it's a pretty good sized bank, in 7 or 8 states, I think.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I'm not a fan of 'floating checks.' And I'm not just saying this because I tried it in college. Well, yes I am.
A check is theoretically a statement of cash availability. It's not a line of credit. The concept being, if you hand a vendor a check, he has every right to walk to a branch of the bank that the check is drawn on and demand payment for it.
Granted, this now requires an onslaught of sales of service to the vendor and probably a fingerprint. But none-the-less, they have to render payment or declare it unservicable.
People have grown to be dependant on the 2 day 'free money' period for vendors that take checks. This unfortunately leads to a large number of people who 'float checks' that shouldn't float in the first place.
Just my money order for 2/100 $US
Wheras depending on if the merchant is an ass. Debit may cost YOU anywhere from $1-$4 per transaction instead of costing them 1.9%-%5. Pardon me...I'll screw the merchant before he screws me.
I know whenever I've looked at the DNS system, I'm astonished that it works at all. The number of queries that the DNS system takes compared to Paypal must be massive - local computer doesn't have the record, refer to ISP, ISP doesn't have the record refer to root server, root server refers down to TLD domain controller (such as PIR for .org's), domain controller refers down to registrar, registrar refers down to host, host responds with the record - all within fractions of a second and all relying on each other. Now *that's* what I call an amazing system! (forgetting of course, it all sits on top of TCP/IP and _that_ routing!)
It's amazing to me how much an outage of this size is impacting a lot of online businesses. Everything from donating to your favorite web comic to the people who depend on Ebay for their daily bread.
;) PayPal got it's zip back. :)
I thought this was a DOS attack myself yesterday, but Reuters says coding problem. Even now at 1.27pm CST, PayPal is up, but really really slow.
Actually....looks like the Internet will be saved.
One thing to note heavily is that some places charge .30->$1.00 (etc) to process that debit card fee. Someone somewhere is making their buck off off using Interlink or whatever networks (read the back of your card) to verify your transaction with a bank. The difference is, the processors have no problem with those fees, and encourage them as much as consumers will bear the cost.
Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover forbid a different cost. If something is offered up as a cash price then handing over your Visa card can not up that price. Some places get around this by offering "cash discounts", but those are mostly small businesses who really can't afford the extra few % a credit card costs.
Another interesting but off topic thing I noticed, is that companies get major discounts from Visa, etc al, if they turn in their signed authorization forms daily (or two days, I forget) for clearing. As well they get another discount for having a phone number appear in their name on the statement. This is sometimes worked to a shady companies advantage knowing you can only see, say, 50 characters, so they make a long name then add the phone number to the end of it, which your credit card bank clips off whent hey print your bill.
I know for a fact Capital One used Tandem Himalayas in the mid 90s to process ALL their CC
transactions....
-1: Bullshit
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.
If X is the new Y, and Y is "X is the new Y", solve for X.