Canadian tax tables not working - pending fix

[snappyanswer]

I use Website Payment Standard with third party shopping cart.

Up until mid-March, I had no problem with the tax tables: Canada at 5% (general) and Ontario 13% (specific). There were several other exceptions, but this worked fine. if ship-to is Quebec, for example, tax is 5% (Canada). If ship-to is Ontario, tax is 13%.

In mid-March, this came to a grinding halt and only 5% was charged, regardless of the ship-to-province.

A supervisor who kindly called me back after I persisted, and told me that I needed to set up tax rates for EACH province, which I did.

The problem continued.

I then discovered that currently, PayPal will only look at the first ALPHABETICAL province, in this case ALBERTA, who only pay 5% tax, not 13%. So now, regardless of the ship-to-province, PayPal checkout only charges 5%.

I went through two weeks of waiting for PayPal to fix this, losing 8% on most of my sales (Revenue Canada will not accept the excuse that PayPal didn't charge it - I am responsible).

I then decided to raise the tax rate for Alberta to 13%, and refund the 8% to those who should not have been charged it. So everybody pays 13% now, regardless of the ship-to-province (I left the other rates as they should be, so I can tell it's not working yet).

The problem is that people do not read the fine print, and so if someone in a province that should only pay 5% sees 13% calculated at checkout, they will abort the purchase and I lose sales.

I can't believe I'm the only one having this problem. PayPal will not tell me when it will be fixed, only that it is a "pending fix".

Any suggestions for an alternate payment provider or a way to get PayPal to fix this now would be greatly appreciated. I am really fed up.

[Schick]

same here and i'm getting fed up! i am responsible for that **bleep** 8%

Paypal need to take this seriously

[snappyanswer]

Have you done anything as a work-around on your website? Is web traffic down? When did you notice it and what have PayPal said to you about it? They won't tell me anything at all.

[Amanda411]

Hi All,

Welcome!

Have you opened a support ticket with the PayPal Merchant Technical Services team?

https://ppmts.custhelp.com

They specialize in helping members with technical issues.

Amanda

[snappyanswer]

Yes, after speaking with PayPal by phone, I finally figured out how to do this (PayPal's site is not user-friendly in this regard). I've been in contact for weeks and weeks now. All the tech people will say is "We are aware of the problem. Thank you for your patience".

Patience is wearing very thin. It's inexcusable for a company to ignore this problem which affects Canadian merchants in such a vulnerable way. We either lose money or we lose business. And these days, PayPal has pretty much of a monopoly for the small business person. Where else can we go?

Is there anything you can do to help us, Amanda? Could you get us more details about why these engineers cannot fix something as simple as a tax-table lookup?

Susan

[jesseka]

I am fustrated with this issue as well.  I have just started a new business and paypal has never worked properly for me.  I thought I was doing something wrong until I called paypal.  The guy I spoke to just kept sighing.  When I said I was from Canada - big sigh.  When I asked if there was a work around - big sigh and long silence.  I had no idea it has been going on this long.  Seems to me paypal just doesn't care about the smaller customers. For now my work around is to have customers email their order and I send a manual paypal invoice.  Just starting up this is hurting us big time.  Who wants to order from a new business you have to submit your order via email.  I think I might try setting the alberta tax to 13% and give refunds.  Most of my customers would be from Ontario anyway. 

I hope paypal takes this seriously and fixes this soon.  It's not fair for us to suffer because we have no where else to go.

[snappyanswer]

We do have elsewhere to go, it just costs more $$$ or is not reliable as well. I checked out Mal's E-Commerce (recommended by PayPal) and apparently they have had major server attacks recently and the owner is non-responsive even to long-time customer merchants. Scary. But then, this situation is also scary since it seemingly happened as a result of a routine maintenance upgrade. If the $$$ was coming out of PayPal's pocket, they would fix it right away.

I wonder if PayPal is trying to force us to upgrade to a more premium account by ignoring the problem? I've just sent an email to inquire if this is the case.

[snappyanswer]

To mark the 8 weeks now that PayPal has had this problem, I sent an email to customer support to ask if there was a product that PayPal offered that DIDN'T have the problem. The sales person who responded said he was unaware of any issues with tax calculations and suggested I call the business support line, which I did.

The person I reached acknowledged that there was a problem and suggested that I delete all of my tax tables and re-enter them while he was on the line, which I did, which had no effect. I asked him if it were possible that all Canadian merchants were having this problem and he did not know. I suggested that if so, it was quite serious and that it was time to escalate the issue, and asked who could he refer me to. Since it's only a call center, he could only pass me up to a supervisor.

The supervisor got on the line and acknowledged that there was a problem, but that not all Website Payments Standard merchants were having a problem. He also said that tech support could not tell WHICH Website Payment Standards customers were having the problem, and that they were collecting data to see which ones did. 8 weeks is a long time to collect data :<  He also said that they didn't know what the problem was or how to fix it, which was very discouraging. He suggested that I try setting up a new PayPal business account and do a test to see if the tax tables calculate correctly (if it did, then they could transfer over all my financial info) I set up a new account and did a test and it still has the same problem. So I am back to square one again. He said he would get someone to respond to me by email to give me more information about what tech support was doing about it.

The email I had sent on Thursday to tech support (I have had a ticket for this since March 2010) was responded to by the tech support team that's working on the problem to say that it was only Website Payments Standard that was having the problem, that they hoped to have a fix by the last week of May, and that he would be in contact when they had it fixed.

Knowing how these things typically go, I don't expect to see a fix by the last week of May. If there is a fix, I'll keep my fingers crossed that they don't **bleep** something else up in the process. Stay posted.

[skier]

Do you really think that your issue will be resolved in a timely manor.   You need to get real !

No way.  It took over 3 years to get the Sales Tax  calculations fixed to the point that we could drill down to a specific Zip Code.   We have been waiting since 2008 to get get the Fraud Filters enabled, open a Developer 
Sand Box Account and see for yourslef,  heck the Fraud Filters been in beta  testing since 2008, perhaps you know something we don't know but, then again we been familar with PayPal development for longer than most folks.  Wine with your cheese and crakers anyone !!!!!

Regards,

skier

[snappyanswer]

Our situation is far less complicated - only 13 taxable provinces/territories. We don't have the same complicated tax structures as you do in the US of A.

I just can't understand how they could mess this up so badly and not know what to do to fix it.

I'm still looking for suggestions on an alternate payment provider solution. Website Payments Pro is an option, but then, it's still PayPal and given the response to this particular issue, not especially appealing at this point ...