Two things I never intend to do for the rest of my life: 1) Ram sharp pieces of glass down my fingernails to the knuckle, and 2) ever have anything to do with PayPal again.
They have taken the mantle of worst customer service on the net for me. I tried to set up a simple merchant account to accept donations for a not-for-profit organization. Simple enough, you would think. They froze part of the functionality of the account because they wanted more information, as they considered us tax exempt. They wanted 3 documents, including a tax exempt certificate. We are not tax exempt, never claimed to be, and never wanted any special treatment. They decided that not-for-profit = tax exempt, which is not true. Anyway, to solve this problem they said to simply fax the documents to the compliance department. I did so. Nothing changed, so I rang the so-called "customer service" helpline. For the privilege of 6p a minute, you need to negotiate an automated help system that very cannily hides any direct option to speak to an operator way down in its myriad of options. If you are lucky enough to stumble upon this (it's not one of the opening options on the menu), you have done well. Remember, if you ever want to speak to a human again, you will need to go down these 3 levels of menu options to find it. The process is long and interminable. Anyway, I finally got through to an agent who said they had not received the fax. And here's another great part of the "customer service": you fax details to the compliance department but speak to "customer service," and they don't speak to each other, brilliant eh? So they had no record of the compliance department receiving it, but you can't speak to the compliance department to confirm it. "OK, so why don't you try uploading the files instead of faxing the files?" said the trying-to-be-helpful operator. Okay. I tried to upload the documents to send to them. Guess what? The servers kept timing out. After 2 hours using both Explorer and Firefox, I finally managed it by sending the documents individually. I waited a few days. The account is still limited. Why? Because they have not received the tax exempt certificate. I contacted customer service again and went through the usual pointless telephone options to speak to an agent. I explained the problem, that the account was still limited. I explained that I would send the tax exempt certificate but could not, because "WE ARE NOT TAX EXEMPT!!!" He said that he would fix this. 2 days later, no change. Meanwhile, automated emails keep arriving from PayPal informing me that this is the nth warning that I need to sort out the account and send the info. Argghhh!!! I spoke to customer service again. I explained the situation. This time he told me that I needed to contact the compliance department and explain the situation. Bear in mind that there is no way to contact them other than through loading up documents, and I can't give them the documents.
By now I have had enough. I told him that come what may, I want the account with them terminated. But I can't close it, he tells me, until this issue is sorted (ha ha). He said that he would contact the compliance department and they would contact me, and also that he would get a senior agent to talk to me so that I could register my vociferous complaints.
It's worth a quick review here just to see how staggeringly bad and incompetent they are at Worldpay. They raise an issue with our account based on faulty assumptions (not-for-profit = tax-exempt). Then they suspend part of the account until it is resolved. But the mechanisms they provide for submitting documentation (fax and upload) neither work properly. The customer service is expensive, time-consuming, and so arcane as to make one suspect that it is almost deliberate obfuscation.
Time spent trying to sort out this simple problem: 8 hours.
Do yourself a favour and do e-commerce with somebody, anybody but PayPal.
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