PayPal appear to be having major reliability issues over the last few weeks. When someone buys my software through PayPal I should get a PayPal notification email and PayPal should send an IPN to e-junkie. The IPN to e-junkie causes a temporary licence key to be emailed to the customer immediately and the full details of the transaction to be emailed to me (I then send a permanent licence key at my leisure). But sometimes the IPN is sent 30+ minutes after purchase. The leads to very unhappy customers. They have paid for their licence and they want the key. Now. Other times the PayPal notification email never arrives. This is less of a problem, but it doesn’t inspire confidence.

It is not just me having these problems. I have seen complaints on quite a few blogs and forums. The problems seem to be particularly acute for subscription payments. This is causing huge problems for some companies. It is rather worrying that:

a) PayPal broke something so fundamental as subscription payments. Don’t they have proper testing before they roll out changes?

b) It still wasn’t fixed 12 days later.

c) PayPal seem completely unresponsive to requests for information from developers when problems occur.

I have also noticed the PayPal sometimes includes the referral data I read from cookies in customer notification emails. There is no reason why customers should see custom data I pass through to PayPal for tracking purposes. I’m not trying to hide the fact I use cookies. But I don’t want to shove it in their face either. Whether they include this custom data in notifications emails seems quite random. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t.

Reliability is my top requirements for a payment processor. PayPal can’t really afford to drop the ball on something as basic as this with GoogleCheckout and Amazon payments breathing down their necks. If I was running PayPal head would be rolling. I hope they sort all these issues out soon. A bit more transparency wouldn’t hurt either.