So the button is on the site and you test it. It works. Hurray! That wasn't too hard. But hey, are you going to test each option on the button in each language? Yes, you should but it seems fine and PayPal is a serious website. Right? WRONG!
A member who tries to pay money is faced with this beautiful message: "PayPal cannot process this transaction because of a problem with the seller's website. Please contact the seller directly to resolve this problem."
Though you might expect PayPal to alert you when such an event happens that is obviously your fault, it never happens. You may keep wondering how much business you've lost due to this fuck up. Well, you made the mistake so you suffer the consequences. Right? WRONG!
The problem is that PayPal's server has some problem with unicode encoding. You have used the Euro sign and dared send it to their server. Your site has a problem. You have a problem. Don't you know that Euro signs are bad? The wizard that generated your code thought of letting you know it but than decided you should learn it the hard way. The hard way would be to go through technical support with a person who obviously doesn't know very much about all the relevant Internet technologies and tells you it's your fault again. It's your page header, it's your CSS (WTF?!?!), it's your bad browser cookies.
You finally create another button without the Euro sign and find out that it wasn't you after all. It was them. It is them. PayPal screwed it up. But it's your fault, you chose to use their services...
The author of this post is not affiliated with PayPal or any other similar service. The story is true. I keep being amazed at how unprofessional PayPal is. Your comments welcomed.
