When Personalization Goes Wrong: PayPal Goes Haywire

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

After winning an eBay auction for a previously elusive (and very durable) Griswold Cast Iron Skillet, I was excited. So much so that I thought I’d pay immediately, in hopes the item would ship out in time for the holidays. Unfortunately, I was unable to pay for my purchase using my favorite online payment service, PayPal.com due to a glitch in the system.

While PayPal is usually problem-free (I’ve completed over 700 PayPal transactions without incident), something went awry when I clicked the familiar Pay with PayPal button. Instead of being presented with English content, my PayPal.com account displayed Chinese. Well, I’m not sure it was Chinese (it could have easily been Korean or Japanese—you’ll have to tell me). Either way, as everything was in a language I did not understand, I could not figure out how to use the system. Even worse, I couldn’t locate the “help center” button nor find any toll-free support lines. I was stuck. So, I turned to Google. I searched for “toll free telephone support” and quickly located the support center hot line, where a knowledgeable technical support expert helped me switch my language preferences back to English.

How did my account get switched to Chinese—or whatever double-byte character set I was seeing? PayPal had no conclusive ideas, although they had a few guesses. I wasn’t impressed. But, I was happy that my PayPal home page again provided navigational cues in a language I could understand.

While this glitch was easily overcome with the help of trained support personnel, I wonder what would happen to those customers who didn’t think (or desire) to search Google for help? Better yet, what are e-Commerce sites doing to prevent such problems from occurring? Am I the only one? Or have you had a similar experience?