PayPal UK Surveys Merchant & Seller Satisfaction

By Garry HJ | October 23rd, 2009 | Category: PayPal | No Comments »

I received an email invitation today to participate in a heavyweight survey from PayPal UK.

The survey is in 3 parts, which I’ve posted in full in BuildaSkill’s PayPal discussion board. Completing part 3 allows you the option to enter yourself into a GBP 1,000 prize draw (did that but doubt I’ll win – I never have luck with anything like that).

When filling out the survey, I was minded before starting, of the posts on AuctionBytes last month regarding tests to feedback using the “Net Promoter” philosophy that Bain and Co have foisted onto eBay as being the way forward for feedback … and completed the survey accordingly.

:snigger

Despite doing that, I still think my answers were a fair assessment of PayPal in accordance with my current thinking about them (both as part of eBay and independent of them). Throughout the survey they used the rating metrics as follows -

Select one answer -
- Much better than expected
- Better than expected
- Same as expected
- Almost as expected
- Worse than expected
- Don’t Know/Doesn’t Apply

The problem with that style of metric, is that at no point in the survey did they attempt to discover what you expected from PayPal - therefore if you’re expecting little, or expecting a lot, it could make a significant difference to the meaning of your answers. By the same token, if you’re unhappy with them, or ecstatic with them, it also adds a whole new skew to your answers in a manner they made no attempt to uncover.

My takeaways from the survey are that they appear to be fishing for several areas -

- Merchant (credit card) services - Perhaps they are coming under pressure from regulators? Remember this is a PayPal UK survey, and they have recently had to make Europe-wide changes to their practices and User Agreement in order to comply with new legislation out of Brussels. Not the least of these is that they have been forced to transfer withdrawals-to-bank within 3 banking days, rather than the 7-10 days they have previously enacted (despite the 5-7 day promise on the withdrawals screen).

- Payment Safety / disputes / chargebacks - they spent quite a bit of the survey on this topic, including the respondent’s opinion of PayPal and their tools in this regard. My thinking is that the recent TimesOnline PayPal-bashing has had some regulators and watchdogs sniffing round the edge of PayPal and it’s sent them scurrying to improve matters in that area.

- Competition - a number of questions addressed this area, but they missed off completely a few types of payment that should have been in the competition lists (namely – Bank Transfers, Online Banking, Mobile Payments, MoneyBookers, and “other online processors”). Because of that, it skewed the results I had to submit, because I had to attribute more relevance to GCO and postal payments than would have otherwise been the case. The fishing in this area seems to be geared (once again) to converting eBay to PayPal only – watch out for it if you complete the survey.

Here’s the full survey question set in our PayPal forums (minus a couple of irrelevant info screens) – you’ll need to be a registered member of our forums, with at least three posts made in the forums, before you can read or comment on the survey content (got to keep the good stuff for active members eh?)