Payment Processor Declines to Feed Child
A worldwide Internet payment processor recently declined to donate even one cent to a charity to feed a starving child following changes it made that caused severe problems to a charity website.
One of the world’s largest Internet payment processors has over 100 million accounts in 103 countries recently caused a charity website’s payment pages to appear to its English customers in the German language.
It was not until someone from Ethiopia wanted to make a donation did the problem come to light. The person wanting to make the donation could not because they couldn’t understand the German payment page being presented to them.
The switch to presenting the sites payment pages in German had probably been like that for about 3 weeks. That was as far as I could tell from another website affected by the same problem.
The payment processors first response to the problem was to suggest that the fault was with the charity website using the wrong code on the sites webpage’s.
This ignored the fact that the pages reverted to being shown in German rather than English when no changes had been made to the sites payment pages. The pages were in English when they were first created.
The next response to the issue was to suggest that the problem was caused by the fact that the charity sites account is based in Switzerland and therefore any payment pages created will be shown in German.
If that were true, why did they choose German, since Switzerland has three main national languages, German, French and Italian and each is the main language in different parts of Switzerland. Millions of people in Switzerland don’t understand German because their language is either French or Italian.
According to the payment processors logic let’s suppose you were running a business in China and wanted to accept payments from English speaking countries. Because your account is based in China your customer’s initial payment page rather than being presented to them in English would be presented to them by default in Chinese.
The suggested solutions to the problem were many and varied, but the end result was that the charity site had no other choice but to replace all the payment code on every affected webpage.
The problem affected not just the charity website but other websites as well.
When the payment processor was asked if they would like to donate something to one of two children’s charities by way of compensation or to show good faith for the problems they caused their response was that they do not offer compensation for their errors.
The Continuing Story
After contacting PayPal by email and telephone to their customer support desk I was advised by their Merchant Technical Support that my payment page language being presented to customers is defaulting to German because the PayPal account is Swiss.
Further more I was advised that I should re-create the button code and make a clear text button and add the following line of code to the generated code:
<input type="hidden" name="lc" value="EN">
They then told me that since I have an encrypted button that I would not be able to add that line of code to it.
This in effect meant that I could no longer use encrypted PayPal code on my webpage’s which in itself would have security implications for other websites.
For those of you not familiar with PayPal’s Merchant Tools section where button code for payments is generated they have an option to select the “Buyers Country” but this is optional.
In other words if you don’t choose the "Buyers Country" the buyer can select it when they make a payment.
What PayPal technical support were telling me was that because I have a Swiss account this is no longer an optional selection, I must choose to set the Buyers Country to US or UK or any country that speaks English.
No where in any of the PayPal publicly available documentation does it state this anomaly.
In fact in nine PayPal documents on integrating and using PayPal payments selecting language options is only mentioned in three sections and at no time does it say what technical support were stating.
Another strange thing about this issue was that a subscription button created using the same Swiss PayPal account was not affected by the problem and its payment pages were still being presented to customers in English and not German.
PayPal offered no explanation as to why this should be so.
The PayPal Swiss support desk suggested it was because I created the buttons when my language profile was set to German and that has caused the problem. Sounds reasonable enough except for the fact the account profile has always been in English.
I pointed out to PayPal that to correct this problem meant having to recreate all the payment buttons again on all the websites that are affected and that would probably be a day’s work.
PayPal were asked if they would offer some compensation for the problems and extra work they have caused by making a donation to one of two fund raising causes :
SOS Children's Village donate at
http://www.artincolors.com/sos-childrens-village-donations.php
And help Feed a Child donate at :
http://www.artincolors.com/feed-the-child.php
PayPal’s response to making a donation to help these children in need was that they do not compensate for coding errors on their part.
Al I can say is shame on you PayPal !
Tony Simpson
website design optimisation
Making Your Website Work for You
Comments
To sdfsfd,
If you would like to give me a real name and a real email address I would be glad to post your comments regardless of the fact that you felt this report to be "nonsense," and "crying over spilt milk."
Tony Simpson.
Posted by: sdfsfd | October 20, 2006 09:45 AM