First, I am not a reflexive Paypal hater – at all. I have used it many times since early in its existence, and have had very, very few problems. In fact, just this year, I actually won my one and only dispute, and it was with a fairly big merchant.

So, this is in no way a reflection of sour grapes, etc.

I just had a watch sent from South America to my home in the U.S., and, much to my chagrin, found today through online tracking that a delivery had been attempted to my previous address (I moved about one year ago), and that the the process of sending the parcel back to the sender had already begun.

Well, WTF happened? I have my correct shipping address as my default on Paypal, and certainly wouldn't have manually changed it. So, I called Paypal customer service, and, to their credit, the person I got was excellent. I frankly have my doubts that the company would want their employees to be so candid, but this one essentially told me that what probably happened was that one of my "alternate" addresses had been mistakenly provided to the seller.

He went on to suggest that this is not an isolated incident, and that he would suggest that I allow him to delete all of the alternate addresses that I have in my account, so as to play it safe going forward.

Having given credit where it is due – the guy was good, and honest – this is absolutely ridiculous! Their system (apparently) occasionally substitutes, without prompting from the account owner, an "alternate" address for the default address?!

Please.

Furthermore – and get this – it is not possible to manually delete those addresses yourself! You must call customer service and have them do it for you. (Doubly ridiculous.)

So, even though it is obviously useful and convenient to have alternate addresses on file, so that one doesn't have to type them in anytime that they are used, there is currently a risk that one may be used without you being aware of it, and you are better off having them deleted.

You'd think that perhaps they could simply fix the fucking system.

 

Sadly Paypal's infrastructure is old and poorly written. From a developer's prospective I have had countless issues when trying to connect to their API to do payment plans, charges, etc. It is NOT intuitive and it seems there are bits and pieces laying around that don't work and some that do. Its a clusterf*ck for lack of better words.

This back-end cluster eventually finds its way to the front-end and issues like you explained happen, causing not only developers, but also the outside world to be hesitant and untrusting. But, when it works it's great!! It's just every now and then you get one of these "easter eggs". This company is about to go public so one would think they would get someone in there to tighten up ship--both back and front end.

I sympathize with you @Tony C.

 

That sucks. But the big question, the important question, the one we all want answered (or at least I do)....






Where are pics of the watch?????!!!

 

Oh, it's just a little ol', under the radar Mido.

 

Thanks for the empathy, but it's not so much the watch, but rather a company of that size having such a ridiculous flaw in their system.

And thank you @x3no for your interesting insight.

 

This just happened to me too. I thought it was my fault. We just moved offices and I had put my new office address as the default shipping address. I just noticed that a watch I have coming was shipped to the old address even though I remembered using the new one. Luckily all of our mail is being redirected but still it irritates.

@dsio sorry to hear about the missing 321. That's got to hurt. This is why I am leery of buying from or selling to Italy. Even though I love the country, its postal system is among the worst in the world.

 

Glad everything worked out for you. I had an issue with PayPal recently where they chose to use my alternative form of payment... willie have been nice if they asked... In their defense, my Company rejected the payment because it was a large transaction on a card I don't use often. Instead of PayPal giving a prompt it was rejected, they just debuted my checking account instead. I called and they said there was nothing they could do. If I wanted to use the credit card (I immediately had lock removed from credit card) I would have to call my bank, have them reject the card, and THEN PayPal would charger credit card...

 

Good to know. But at the same time, this is probably why I don't use PayPal

 

Oh. A Paypal Warning. Never mind.

 

Ouch.......I only transacted from Italy once....glad it turned out OK. But the horror stories about Italy postal service just keep conitunuing.......

 

Its more good than bad, my problem is the fees but they have to make money. An occasional blip is not a bad thing, nothing will ever be 100% perfect. Thanks for the warning though, it is always a good idea to remove stale addresses from all services/ecommerce sites after you've moved just in case, not just with paypal. JIC