In the last few days we are being hit by a very strange issue. From what we understand it is related to the way Paypal interacts with Union Pay (China).
Here's what happens:
1) Customer sends a payment to us
2) Customer confirms the money is gone from their bank account and records in their Paypal account clearly state the payment is sent and completed.
3) We receive a standard email from Paypal about the received payment
4) We do NOT receive an IPN (which means our invoice is not marked as paid)
5) Customer contacts us: "Uhmmm, where is my money?"
So, at this point the money is clearly gone from customer's bank account and from their paypal account. But, in our account the payment shows as "Pending". For more fun, when we try to access the payment directly by transaction ID, Paypal simply says there is no such transaction at all.
...... Which also means we cannot refund the transaction.... This is the part where customer goes WTF!?! and opens a dispute.
So we go to the dispute page, and try to refund the payment from there, right? No, we get: "You cannot refund this type of transaction."
We contact Paypal. Guess what Paypal does? They just close the dispute. We still cannot refund the payment, and our customer probably thinks Paypal is getting a kickback from us for helping us steal his money.
Similar nonsense occurred a few DOZEN times in the last 48 hours (and this never happened before).
We've been on the phone with Paypal a few times today. Each person says different things. Examples:
Person1: there are new regulations in China - customers must now call their bank to "approve" these transactions
Person2: there are no issues that we can see with either your account or sender's account
Person3: we confirm the issue and we are working on it (no ETA).
So far all we could achieve is - we had Paypal block all payments from Union Pay to our account so that the size of the mess does not increase. This issue does not affect any other payment method but Union Pay.
We will keep bugging Paypal until they fix this mess. But the main question is: anyone else got hit by this or we're special?