A client wanted a donate button on her website. It was to send money to the kids cancer fund, a worthy cause, and so she went on to Paypal's website and used one of their little generators to make up a button, then sent me the code to post on her site.
Which, of course, I did.
But there was a problem. In firefox the button worked just fine. But in Internet Explorer the button takes you to a Paypal error page. "Sorry, an error occurred after you clicked the last link" .
There is no way to make the donation.
Now it is odd for a couple of reasons. Reason #1 - Paypal provided the client with the code. Provided the client with code that doesn't work on around 80% of the browsers out there.
I went and found other sites with donate buttons and tried to click on them. Same thing.
So they've essentially cut themselves off from 80% of the internet.
Now this is dumb. Beyond dumb. This is a company that makes it's living off of processing payments - a rake off and commission on both ends, charging the payer and the collector. And their own code doesn't work on 80% of the browsers.
Possibly it's just a temporary glitch, so I Google the error message.
26,900,000 results.
And I go to some of the forums, hosted on Paypal itself, reading tirades of customer abuse and threats of lawsuits, see for yourself here:
And the forums go on and on, with the paypal staff denying there's a problem, developers acknowledging there is a problem, problem not being fixed....
The developers propose workarounds, but for all the home based web authors who are not technically inclined they are absolutely useless.
Absolutely useless. Why should they troubleshoot something when it's Paypal themselves who provided them the code? Don't they want their money, or what? The 26, 900, 000 results, that's only the people irate enough to post, how many people quietly drop it, remove the code, don't complain, leave their money in limbo....? And how many posts did they delete from their forums with the excuse that users were using foul language, or not adhering to forum rules? One can imagine getting upset about this, something about a company illegally siezing or freezing your funds tends to raise your blood pressure.....
The forum? Read the dates on the posts. 11-17-2008 06:21 AM. Almost a year. And the issue is ongoing, they're still generating code that doesn't work, and even more remarkably, they're still in business.
In technical terms, this is an easy thing to fix. Come up with code that works across all browsers, even if it has to be a hardcoded URL. It doesn't get too much simpler than this. But they haven't done it. They refuse to do it.
Yet they're still in business. If you ever need to send me money, for whatever reason, use Canada post or Western Union. Never, ever, ever use Paypal.