Payments Not Showing Up
Some people have their PayPal accounts set to not auto-accept payments. (Someone want to tell me why? I have no idea why you'd want to do that.) You have to accept the payment at PayPal before it will show up on your progress bar.
posted by Andre at
1:59 PM
4 Comments:
Those who sell at auction sites may keep auto-accept OFF because of this scenario:
1. Auction site / PayPal payment system allows client to originate payment to seller automatically, without seller's direct involvement.
2. Client and/or payment system incorrectly calculates total amount to be submitted, often resulting in a *lower* than necessary payment.
3. Client sees "payment accepted" and reads that phrase as "paid in full". Of course, it doesn't necessarily mean that, but many clients see it that way. Seller then must backtrack, cancel initial payment, and get client to resubmit payment in correct amount, and/or get client to send an additional payment to total correct amount (but this is undesirable as it violates PayPal Seller Protection Policy and costs more money because another fixed PayPal fee must be paid for the second payment). PayPal has fixed the problem in case of overage at least, because they now offer partial refunds. But I'd argue the underpayment is more likely.
Sellers would prefer to be able to see if a payment is correct before accepting it. Then if it's wrong, it can be denied and a correct invoice submitted. This seems to be easier and clearer for both parties.
There are also some other considerations, where for certain activities, recipients may not want to accept donations from certain people for unknown reasons. A more concrete example would be political fundraising - if a politician or even an interest group used DropCash, they would have to make sure that nobody was able to contribute in excess of the legal limit. You many simply choose not to support such types of donation collecting, but that would limit the scope of this service.
Solution? A. Separate PayPal account for accepting donations or B. PayPal should modify API to support "sent, but not accepted" payments as "provisional" in some way. Perhaps a differently shaded or patterned portion of the bar graph on DropCash pages could be used to represent payments sent but not yet accepted.
(Note that I'm assuming the PP API *doesn't* have such a feature for provisional payments or otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion.)
By
Johnathan, at August 28, 2004 at 11:44 PM
Ahh! Well that makes a ton of sense. Thank you for the detailed post.
By
Andre, at September 7, 2004 at 1:00 PM
I had another thought. Would it be possible to add, say, a checkbox on the main page that lists all campaigns, which, when checked, would add a bit of text indicating payments weren't automatically accepted to each campaign page, so that visitors / donators would realize that the meter might not move up "instantly" when they contribute?
I think it would prevent a possible annoyance.
BTW, I stole the code for the little badge above. Cool!
By
Johnathan, at September 7, 2004 at 4:36 PM
Well, after people donate we do give them a bit of text telling them the payment might not immediately show up:
http://www.dropcash.com/campaign/JonThompson/get_me_a_new_imac/thank-you/
But, I hope we can make it more obvious that some payments could be pending.
By
Andre, at September 8, 2004 at 12:20 AM
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