Buyer unable to pay with Paypal

[triber]

I am not on MP yet, but I just had this message from a buyer

Hi, I tried buying this all day yesterday but it just would not complete on paypal for some reason. This morning was to be my last attempt before giving up.

[tyler@ebay]

Hi @triber - did your buyer let you know any particular error they were receiving? Even if you were on managed payments your customers could still use PayPal to make payment - this sounds like something else may be wrong. 

[triber]

Thanks for your reply Tyler, I will contact her and ask about the error, as you see, she tried many times.

[marnotom!]

Well, she CLAIMS to have tried many times 🙄

Is this a pretty experienced buyer? Are they from Canada or somewhere else?

[triber]

Almost 13000 feedbacks, obviously experienced. I can see no reason why she would just claim to have tried and finally managed it today.

[darak10]

Ive sold on here for several years and I've heard this from customers quite a few times.  It didnt happen alot but it did happen with minimal regularity.  it last happened to one of my customers to my recollection in fall sometime.  I'm surprised given your feedback score that this an unfamiliar situation to you.  

Theres a multitude of reasons, I think it probably was some kind of anomalous API error somewhere between ebay and PayPal.   The unfortunate and more frustrating side effect from a customer experience perspective is that it normally resulted in the customer getting the runaround and being told by ebay CS it was paypal's problem and then vice versa when they called PayPal so they would just give up and leave and buy it somewhere else.  I havent been on MP long enough to experience this yet (ten days now, everything going ok) but hopefully one of the side effects of MP will be to prevent these experiences from happening again as they result in lost business for us and poor user experience for the customer.