StatCounter, the popular Web traffic counter, is blaming PayPal for a series of technical errors that have allegedly resulted in StatCounter customers being double billed and the company losing "thousands of dollars," according to the StatCounter blog. PayPal has taken action to solve some of the reported problems, but StatCounter claims that many of the major issues have yet to be addressed.
The issues apparently started on May 15 after a PayPal software upgrade, which have resulted in incomplete "payment files" for those StatCounter customers who pay via PayPal, says the StatCounter blog. As a result, the blog continues, those customers experienced a litany of problems, ranging from double billed invoices, duplicate emails, and broken subscriptions. StatCounter claims it is unable to tell if it has received payments from its customers:
"Although we would be delighted to sort out any double billing for you, in the current climate of confusion we are unsure whether WE are actually receiving the erroneously charged amounts. This means that WE are not currently able to refund any of these overpayments to you. We strongly believe that since this is a Paypal error, Paypal should rectify the situation - and leave us to focus again on our members rather than cleaning up a mess of Paypal’s making. Please do report any double billing to us and we will take action to report each case directly to Paypal."
There is an international component to the outage, reports Tech Blorge. The Clicky Blog cites additional problems, and dozens of readers who claim to be merchants have left angry comments about PayPal's response to the outage -- as well as recommendations of what alternate services to use.
In the meantime, StatCounter is refraining from issuing new invoices to customers using PayPal. It says staff repeatedly attempted to contact PayPal through email and online forums, but didn't get any response until the crisis reached a head earlier this week.
The PayPal blog has an entry by one of the senior networking staff that says there will be an scheduled maintenance outage tonight, but there is no mention about whether or not it's related to the issues that StatCounter identified. The Industry Standard submitted a request for a comment from PayPal, but has yet to hear back from the service, which is owned by eBay.
The StatCounter service was founded by Aodhan Cullen in 1999 when the Irish teen was just 16 years old. It's now used by millions of people to track traffic to blogs, online storefronts, and other sites.
(Disclosure: I use the free version of the StatCounter service for my personal blogs)
Comments
Hi Ian,
Many thanks for drawing attention to the problems we have been highlighting.
I am delighted to be able to let you know that Paypal have now acknowledged the double billing issue.
http://www.paypaldeveloper.com/pdn/blog/article?blog.id=mts_updates&mess...
For any merchants our there whose customers have been affected by double billing, Paypal have confirmed that you can EITHER refund one of the two transactions by yourself OR contact their merchant support.
As far as we can see, ALL the issues we previously reported are now RESOLVED.
Our blog details the sequence of communications that followed our writing a post about the issues.
http://blog.statcounter.com/?p=88
Jenni
StatCounter Team
Hi Ian,
I'm a web developer and I've used PayPal in a few of my projects. There is a way TO implement PayPal and there is the corner cutter way NOT to implement PayPal. I bet I can guess which way statcounter used. ;) By the way, you mentioned that you are using statcounter on your blogs, maybe you should try using google analytics or gostats - both are compelling systems which I swear by - neither affected by PayPal's problems.
Best,
Craig
Hi again,
Thanks for your advice Craig - unfortunately the problems with Paypal were reported by merchants globally and had nothing to do with how Paypal was implemented by specific merchants. Problems arose for everyone affected when Paypal rolled out a system update on 15 May. (This info is all in our blog if you want to read up on it.) However, if you DO think that you know how all of these problems could have been circumvented, then I'm sure that Paypal would love to hear from you ;)
One major concern for us involved the fact that many of our members are merchants themselves. On behalf of our members, as well as on behalf of ourselves, we decided to draw attention to the matter via our blog. We hoped this would mean that, not alone would OUR problems be sorted, but that the problems would be resolved on behalf of our "merchant" members also. Our members are hugely important to us and we couldn't stand idly by and do nothing while so many (both as customers and merchants) were being impacted. We were delighted, therefore, to see some comments like these on our blog:
http://blog.statcounter.com/?p=88#comment-8660
http://blog.statcounter.com/?p=88#comment-8772
Maybe I'm picking you up wrongly Craig, but you do seem a little negative towards us? We aim to offer a top class service to our members and work continuously to improve the service we provide. I'm not sure if you have used StatCounter before - if not then you are more than welcome to sign up! If your experience with us was not positive then we would love to know how we could do better - if you have suggestions or feedback for us, we'd love to hear from you:http://www.statcounter.com/contactus.html and please mark your comments for my direct attention.
All the best!
StatCounter Jen: Thanks for the update. Reminder to all readers: PayPal has apparently resolved these issues. Call off the hounds!
Craig: Craig, PayPal has acknowledged fault here, and there's another issue that's worth mentioning: A complete lack of a response from the service for many days, despite repeated attempts by many merchants to get answers. This has been documented by StatCounter and others, and I would like to note that I never received a response to my media inquiry. Your other suggestion about Google Analytics is a good one -- I actually do use Google's service, but one area in which it is very lacking is frequency of updates. StatCounter is instantaneous, as far as I can tell, while Google Analytics lags by many hours. I also like StatCounter's reverse chron visitors report, which, as far as I can tell, doesn't exist in GA. That said, the GA reports are generally more comprehensive and customizable, and I like the interface better.
Hi Jen,
Allow me to correct your statement: "The problems with PayPal only affected some merchants who failed to properly & cleanly implement the API." It is either ignorance or sheer misleading statements about the source of the problem on your part. Many other reputable merchants either use a proper PayPal API solution or fixed one within the 2 week bug window. Yes, I did read through your blog post mentioned in this article - to my dismay PayPal is not the only company which you have pointed your finger at for your own faults.
At this time it looks like your site is not functioning at all (let alone the blog comments you posted about). Who's to blame for your problems THIS time? Top class service? Are people *really* losing their stats data now?
Hi Ian,
Without re-iterating the "it's not my problem - it's them!" pattern, I would like to mention that critical business functions such as payment processing aren't areas where one can simply throw up their arms and declare total innocence/non-responsibility when a problem happens. Payments are just not that simple. And few reports of this issue correctly and objectively understood the actual problem at hand. To the credit of many, it's not so easy a concept! Thanks for your opinion on both SC and GA; but I trust that you've done some thorough research about the best alternatives? I used statcounter - but have found some others to be of a higher caliber. You should consider some great ones like: sitemeter, shinystat, gostats, onestat. (all of which I have tried and found to be superior to statcounter) - *sorry, no offense Jen!*
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/08/web-sites-using.html
http://www.oneprojectcloser.com/general/sitemeter-crashing-internet-expl...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site_Meter
On August 1, 2008, Sitemeter experienced a system-wide bug that caused all sites displaying its tracking code to fail to load when browsed with Internet Explorer v6.0 and v7.0. This problem persisted for over 16 hours. Firefox & Safari users were not affected.
On September 14, 2008, Sitemeter attempted to migrate. Complaints began immediately, and Sitemeter decided to rollback its migration on September 14, 2008, though reasons for the rollback are pending.
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