BillMeLater A Portrait of Incompetence on a Massive Scale Internet

For those of you unfamiliar with BillMeLater, this is a company that Ebay purchased to work in conjuction with their PayPal subsidiary company.  The idea is to provide PayPal purchasers with an option to delay their payments by financing them through BillMeLater.  To promote signups, Paypal has sent out emails to selected PayPal accounts that they are pre-approved for "up to $100 off your first purchase and make no payments until April 2010".  They further state that "Next time you checkout at eBay or any participating PayPal store" simply use your PayPal account and select Bill Me Later as the payment option.

This system probably works very well except I made a mistake.  I bought something on Ebay for $194 and entered the wrong PayPal email in the payment (we have two PayPal accounts).  I realized my mistake and called BillMeLater to see what I could do.  They said that I would have to talk to Paypal.  I talked to Paypal and they said to just have the Ebay seller cancel the transaction, which I did.  So far so good...

Next we went to make the purchase with the correct PayPal account, the one with the $100 off offer.  We committed to buy and selected BillMeLater as the payment option (which was now showing the "up to $100 off" offer on that part of the screen).  When we clicked continue a window popped up and said "We're sorry, but Bill Me Later could not authorize this purchase.  You'll get an email with the details.  (which we never received).  You can complete the purchase with a different way to pay.  Please select one on the next page."

We clicked continue and the BillMeLater option was gone from our PayPal payment options page.  We called BillMeLater and they had no record of our account.  The customer service rep told me that there was nothing she could do about the refusal and did not know why it would happen, but assured us that she would find out what happened and get back to us.  We haven't heard anything since.

We went ahead and paid for the item on our charge card, disappointed that we were having to pay $100 more than we had planned.  We only made the purchase because of the $100 off offer and didn't really have the extra money in our budget, but we figured the Ebay seller needed to be paid.

That was yesterday.  Today when we log into our PayPal account (the one where BillMeLater said they could not authorize the purchase) the screen says we have a BillMeLater balance of $194!  We called BillMeLater and were told that they have no record of a turn down or a cancellation and that, if there were a cancellation, it would take two weeks to 30 days for it to show on their records.

The final straw is that, when we log into the FIRST PayPal account, it ALSO shows a balance of $194 owing!!  So instead of paying a net $94 for an Ebay item, we have put $194 on our card and BillMeLater says we owe them $388!!!

I will update this post as things develop but I will really be interested to hear the explanation about how I could have a purchase not authorized but still have the amount show up as owing in my account!

And this entire promotion is Ebay's attempt to get people to sign up for BillMeLater!