eBay UK’s PayPal forum lit up over the weekend with complaints of several natures ranging from buyer’s inability to pay for wins on eBay UK, through to retried failure screens then taking multiple deductions from bank accounts and funding cards, but showing a single transaction on PayPal.

Then last night, for over two hours, PayPal was successfully posting payments to sellers’ accounts and immediately refunding them back to the buyers.

In this eBay forum thread opened by a buyer at 11:30 GMT Saturday, eBay UK Community Manager James responded 49 hours later (Monday at 12:47 GMT) -

Afternoon All

Apologies for any delay in updating you, I’ve been waiting on details for what’s happened.

I can confirm that the issue last night with Buyer’s being unable to pay was resolved earlier this morning. All buyers should now be able to pay for items and if you have payments outstanding please reach out the buyer and ask them to retry.

Some sellers also saw Payment Reversals yesterday and I can also confirm that this was part of the same issue. Any sellers saw the reversals between 8PM CET – 23:20 PM CET (11:00am PST – 14:20 PST) on November 30, 2008 please ask your buyers to attempt payment again and report any further issues with that to PayPal directly.

I appreciate your patience in waiting for this update.

Regards
James

To which someone using a posting ID quickly quipped, “CET? GMT is better for the UK and Ireland.
But thanks.”

Et tu Brute?

Many users reported that the problems did not manifest themselves on private website payments via PayPal, nor were they reported for sales from other eBay sites by UK sellers with payments into their UK PayPal account.  UK Buyers were able to make payments direct to the sellers through the PayPal site, provided they chose the “Goods” payment reason, but not when they chose the “eBay Items” reason for payment.  To many, this confirms the problem was within the eBay UK servers.

As of around 14:00 GMT, logging into PayPal UK was still very slow – it took almost 4 minutes to change from the ID and password screen to the account display when I tried it.

Months of continual glitches and bugs in the UK PayPal system could be said to be “Unsprung dearth of Teknik” … as a Bavarian auto-maker might have said in their adverts years ago?

Ed