How not to decline a transaction – ebay and paypal 2013

I was amazed today trying to checkout on ebay that ebay and Paypal still haven’t figured out how the transaction flow is supposed to work. If a paypal transaction declines when checking out on ebay, rather than giving an error like reason would suggest, they just dump you on a login page. Yes folks, a login page. I’m more or less laughing at this instead of being upset because it’s so absurd that I can hardly believe it myself.

I repeated the process 3 times just to rule out user error and took some screen shots for entertainment.

The ebay checkout page:

The payment page:

The decline page:

I was only able to figure out this was a decline when I logged in again, and then finally there was a cryptic message about the card being declined. After trying a second card and inevitably going through a loop of declines I eventually gave up on trying to make payment.

Anyway, this is a good example of what not to imitate. It should be pretty embarrassing for both ebay and Paypal considering they are considered founders in ecommerce and online payments. Happy holiday!