International payment bug leads to PayPal horror show

A simple bug with a drop-down menu on PayPal has been preventing international transactions for over twelve days, and users are understandably upset.

"One Time Purchases" between countries remains functional, however, when on the "Subscription Checkout Page," PayPal customers cannot choose their country when entering credit card information during checkout.

So whenever the user changes the entry in the drop-down box, the page refreshes itself but without changing the country information. It is impossible for buyers to complete a subscription transaction. Though it took a week for the site to acknowledge the bug, at 11:00 am today, PayPal finally "scheduled fixes to be rolled out to the live site."

There is no forecast for how long this will take, and merchants who rely on PayPal, such as Clicky Web analytics, are out of luck.

From the company's blog: "As a Web developer, I know how easy this problem is to fix. It's a drop down box. This problem could be fixed in a matter of minutes, so why has it taken them 10+ days? How many millions of dollars has this bug cost all of PayPal's customers? I would be so ashamed of myself if I was the one responsible for this bug, that I would quit immediately and go apply for a job flipping burgers, because that would be more my skill level."

Perhaps this is the risk using an Internet company that is not a bank to handle your payments.

BetaNews has first hand reports of dealing with PayPal regarding blocked payments from Liechtenstein -- one of the most business-dense countries in the industrialized world -- and support had no idea of the country's existence. One member of the support team suggested that it was part of another country.