Balcells Blog Home

So, I don't remember if I talked about this but I was stunned a few months back when I encountered a repeatable pervasive bug on eBay's checkout.

It turns out if you have had an eBay account for more than 20 years - hehe, I have - then some of the code is no longer backwards compatible on the checkout, and it exhibits undesirable behavior. What happens that is that if you select to pay with Paypal, the payment does not necessarily happen on your default payment card. In fact, eBay checkout ignores your selected default payment method on Paypal and they use whatever they want. I suspect the original code did not factor in the possibility of Paypal allowing multiple cards and the ability to change the card you want to use when checking out with Paypal.

I experienced this a few times. The first time I thought I made a mistake selecting the wrong card upon checkout. But in subsequent attempts I noted carefully which card I selected, and the payment still went to a different card. I contacted eBay once I had enough evidence. To my surprise, I was trasnferred to a "specialist" who knew exactly what I was talking about. Without admitting it was a bug on their code, she politely asked me to UNLINK my Paypal account from eBay, and advised that this was the ONLY way to stop this behavior. The checkout on eBay works completely differently now and once you unlink your Paypal account, new code takes over and allows you to select the payment card you want to use for each transaction through Paypal. I was very skeptical of all this, but reluctantly did what the eBay lady asked me after she re-assured me she dealt with this all the time and this was the solution.

Sure enough, after 20 years linked, once I unlinked by Paypal account from eBay, the behavior changed and now I had the ability to select a different card on each transaction and the charges posted correctly.