04
Feb

PayPal’s Site and Service Need Help

In Technology | Comments

We’re a small team and we design user interfaces and user experiences. We don’t know much, but we’re driven to deliver intuitive interfaces.

PayPal is a multi-million (or billion?) dollar company and you’d think their site would be somewhat intuitive, but it fails in almost every way.

We previously charged recurring subscription feeds via PayPal for our club, but did away with that in lieu of the new bundles. We’d now like to cancel the recurring subscriptions for our customers to save them time, but the task is becoming nearly impossible due to PayPal’s horrible customer experience.

I’m not a rocket scientist, but know my way around interfaces and the web in general. The PayPal site has stumped me for well over a week now.

Here’s a few of the many failures:

  1. Sloooow load times. Paypal’s site has always been painfully slow for me.
  2. Crummy user nav. I go to My Account thennn, History? Profile? Where are Subscriptions?
  3. Only 3 Months of Search. We have members from years ago, when I search “All Activity” that only goes back 3 months?
  4. Horrendous Pagination. I can only go to the Next or Prev page? No numbered search results?
  5. Can’t change number of results. I can only view 20 at a time? What is this, 1992?
  6. No Sorting. So I can’t sort by Active, Price, Created Date… nothing?

Ok, so at this point I obviously need help. I’m sure that’s going to be easy right? Wrong.

Here’s my adventure:

  1. Click on Help
  2. I see Subscriptions in the list yay! I click on it.
  3. 2 measly results, neither helpful at all.
  4. One of the results says “Change the date back to the year the subscription was created” but you can’t even select the year.
  5. Hesitantly click on “Ask Sarah” a virtual assistant (cause I guess PayPal doesn’t have the budget for a real online assistant)
  6. Any word or phrase I type Sarah tells me she don’t know nuthin’ and to go away.
  7. Waaaay down in the corner I find “Contact us by phone or email” and click on it.
  8. PayPal tries to force me to Ask the Community or guess what??? Ask stupid Sarah
  9. I click Email Us
  10. Instead of an Email form I get a list of questions, none of which include my issue.
  11. I choose the closest solution and am asked to type my question, which I do.
  12. I’m taken to a screen to enter 1 transaction ID??? Whaaaaa? I just wanted to send a simple email!
  13. So now I guess I’ll try the Phone option tomorrow, I bet I’ll get a live helpful person there!

(as a side note I also replied to an email from service@paypal.com, in which I got an autoresponder that I couldn’t email this address and I should try their awesome Help section)

FAIL

Update 2/20/10:

I finally jumped through the hoops to call support, and PayPal’s phone support is nothing short of amazing. I would have never guess it, but yes, PayPal’s phone support rocks.

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  • This reminds me of a story I recently read on Dustin Curtis' website. Here's the link to his three articles where he described why American Airlines needed a new website with interface improvements. The second is actually a letter back to him from the UX designer at the company. And the third is (sadly) a note on how the employee was fired after AA found his letter to Dustin published on the web.

    Anyway, it's a sad story but brings to light a lot of the problems with corporations (like PayPal) that are run by committees. (The three links are at the top of the page).
    http://dustincurtis.com/dear_american_airlines_...
  • Great reference Tim,
    That's just sad and I bet similar things go on with PayPal. So much stuff is done so wrong in large corporations. I'm sure it's tough when you have that many employees and so much on the line, but can you imagine what would happen if large corporations would listen to experts in their own fields?
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