First published: 30th November 2008
A botched roll-out of a new Hong Kong Paypal website left some customers unable to access their accounts. The problem affected visitors to the new Hong Kong Paypal site: www.paypal.com.hk, and the international site: www.paypal.com, presenting a webpage in Chinese, without readable links for other languages. It seems that Paypal ignores the W3C recommendations on language negotiation, and has not learnt from the failures of Trend Micro and McAfee Associates.
Paypal announced their new website in an email to Hong Kong-registered customers, boldly claiming, "PayPal now speaks your language! Find what you need in Traditional Chinese or English". Oddly, the message included English and Chinese text, but the MIME content-type header was "text/plain;charset=iso-8859-1", a character set that does not support Chinese. Visiting the .hk site presented an entirely Chinese page (screenshot below), with no obvious option to change the language. OK, you might think, no problem, go to the international site and check - but Paypal also configured their international site with a Chinese-only page for Hong Kong customers (screenshot below).
Paypal's Hong Kong customer service were able to help - it is simply necessary to clear the browser cookies in order to get the English version of the site. However, contacting customer service is more of a problem... customers can, of course, login and check the contact details page, but what sensible customer would enter their username and password, and start exploring links in a language they do not understand, on a site that handles their money? One method is to check the whois record at HKDNR for paypal.com.hk - this provides the company name, eBay International HK Ltd., but no phone number. Directory enquiries cannot provide a phone number for the company (eBay was unable to explain why their phone number is not listed). However, calling HKDNR provides the direct line of the eBay Administrative Officer, Amy, who was able to provide customer support numbers for Paypal (35508574) and eBay (35508586) in Hong Kong.
Although the workaround is simple, questions remain for the company:
Updated: 23rd December 2008
Reports have emerged that some web vendors using Paypal have lost sales because of Paypal's poorly-designed changes to their language handling. The problem occurs when a customer at an e-commerce site follows a link to Paypal's shopping cart or checkout pages. The Paypal documentation states that these pages default to US (meaning English) but it appears that Paypal's recent changes have made this the assumed language of the registration country of the vendor's Paypal account. For example, sales for a Hong Kong-based Paypal account would be directed to a Traditional Chinese Paypal page, regardless of the customer's browser language preferences, customer's location, or vendor's language preferences. It is not possible to confirm, but it appears that this "feature" has followed the roll-out of new Paypal languages, with older reports describing a similar problem with Italian and Spanish.
The Paypal documentation describes the use of an lc HTML variable to specify the language, though, as an additional challenge to web-developers, the HTML variable incorrectly uses ISO 3166-1 country codes to specify the language, instead of the language codes set by browsers.
