Through some work of magic i dragged myself out of bed at 6am this morning so i could get into the city by 8am to goto the PayPal Developer Day, a half day event put on by PayPal to engage the web developer community. While the day was great and I learnt alot about PayPal’s products, a few issues come to mind.

1. I got the feeling PayPal loves the buyer more than the Merchant, something seems backwards there
2. PayPal want you to think “outside the box” but still do things their way?  I must say though, being forced to do things their way is sometimes a good thing, othertimes not so much.
3. Criticism is generally met with spin – some products were criticised or lack of products and spin spin “maybe we will, maybe we’ll do something else” just answer the question, if you don’t know you don’t know.
4. They failed to engage our local web community as a whole, due to this the turnout was terrible, next time get in touch with the AWIA.
5. My security key won’t activate, i called on the phone for help (i’ll never be calling PayPal again, just because your primary business is online, it doesn’t mean your phone support can be TERRIBLE, yes that’s right my experience was TERRIBLE)

I want to expand upon that last point, at the event we were told we could activate the security keys onto our accounts, upon trying to do this when i got back to work it just wouldn’t activate.  The error eventually told me to call the 1800 number, which i did.  After waiting on hold i spoke to a girl who basically kept telling me I had no card associate with my account and i didn’t order it, after i repeatidly told her how i aquired it free at the Developer Day.  She then asked me if it was an eBay security key, which i told her it wasn’t, she then told me it was an eBay security key because thats the only way i can get a free one and that i needed to call eBay.  After 15 minutes of this back and forth over the card i gave up, fairwelled the young lady, tweeted to @PayPalAustralia to try get help (still waiting but thats ok, it’s friday night) and now have a very negative perception of the kind of service my customers are going to receive when they phone PayPal with an issue.

Later in the afternoon i thought i’d try my hand at another call (after all the website did tell me to call that number to sort it out).  This time, the prompter forwarded me to another line that basically went like this “We’re experiencing a high volume of calls at the moment, most questions can be answered by visting the help link at the top of every page, Thank You for calling PayPal, have a nice day *hang up*”.  Ummm, if the call centre your IVR is targetting me to doesn’t have enough lines to take my call, that’s possibly the worst way you can handle the situtation.

All in all the developer day itself was great and i hope they come back next year if only so everyone can come next time.  But I feel PayPal Australia still have a bit more to do in Australia to win people over, they still have a very negative perception amongst alot of users (just because they’re active users, doesn’t mean they’re happy users), but they definately look to be taking steps towards changing how they’re perceived.