Philipp Justus, senior vice president of global markets for PayPal announced the launch of fully localized sites in Mexico, Hong Kong and Singapore, on the PayPal blog earlier today. This extends PayPal’s online payments service to the more than 120 million residents of these three countries.
We now display content on our sites in nine new languages: Bahasa Indonesian, Danish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese and Turkish. In addition, we introduced new PayPal domains for 18 countries, including Argentina, Chile, Hungary, India, Luxembourg, Malta, The Philippines, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Taiwan, Turkey and Venezuela. Customers in these countries can access PayPal via a dedicated URL and web site (for example, https://www.paypal.com.ph for the Philippines), which displays relevant PayPal information and products available in that country. Finally, we’ve upgraded our service to deliver more relevant information to our customers in 173 countries, making it much more convenient to use PayPal for our global base of buyers and sellers.
These new web sites and languages benefit consumers by making it even easier to buy from merchants around the world; and they’ll help merchants sell internationally much more efficiently, just in time for the busy holiday season. In fact, my colleague Eddie Davis posted a blog on Monday with some tips to help U.S.-based businesses sell internationally during the holidays.
It’s great to see that global business is being supported for localized international markets. This seems like a fairly significant expansion which is why I wanted to link to it here. However, even though I had already planned on writing about PayPal this week, I thought it was going to be with regard to a system announcement post that I saw over the weekend:
***Updated: Issues with Third-Party Checkouts and PayPal – RESOLVED***
November 16, 2008 | 07:26PM PST/PT
Some buyers, when trying to pay their sellers through a third-party checkout service and PayPal, were being charged incorrect shipping amounts. This has been fixed, and the correct shipping amounts should now be charged. We apologize for the frustration this caused, and appreciate your patience while we resolved the problem.
***Previous update: Issues with Third-Party Checkouts and PayPal***
November 16, 2008 | 07:45AM PST/PT
Some buyers, when trying to pay their sellers through a third-party checkout service and PayPal, are being charged incorrect shipping amounts. Although we expected the fix to be ready last night, we ran into some unexpected difficulties and now expect it to be resolved later today. We apologize for the frustration this is causing both our buyers and sellers, and assure you that we will continue working nonstop until this is fully resolved.
***Original: Issues with Third-Party Checkouts and PayPal***
November 15, 2008 | 01:18PM PST/PT
We have learned that some buyers, when trying to pay their sellers through a third-party checkout service and PayPal, are being charged incorrect shipping amounts. Please be assured that we are working hard to resolve this issue as quickly as possible, and hope to have the fix in place by tonight. We apologize for the frustration this must be causing both our buyers and sellers.
The key sentence there is “This has been fixed, and the correct shipping amounts should now be charged.” I’m in the process of finding out what steps are being made retroactively to assist those that were impacted over the weekend. I’ll let folks know more when I do.
Cheers,
RBH