Hi,

I went to paypal to make a payment and noticed that when you send a payment for the first-time from a new account, it asks you to enter a code (series of letters and numbers) in a box as a confirmation.

A serious problem here is an issue with the "numbers" and one can not tell the differences between "zeros and the letter O". When I did the transaction today, I had to do this 3 times and the thrird time it worked because there were no numbers in the code, just letters. I think paypal needs to address this and use only numbers or letters and not a combination. If this was confusing for me, I suspect that it is too for a lot of users and hence may be they leave without completing the transaction.

Yahoo has a similar thing when you sign-up for emails, but I notice that they only use letters and not a combination of letters and numbers.

I would like to hear any experiences from others as well as from paypaldamon.

Gurudev,

I don't remember the process for signing up for PayPal; it's been awhile (and probably has changed since anyway).

But I do recall signing up for a Yahoo account, and since you mentioned the process you mentioned for PayPal is similar, I thought I'd ask this:

Can you simply cut-and-paste the code on the browser or your e-mail and put it into whatever field is demanding it? That kind of skips the whole 0/O (zero vs. "O") issue.

Not sure if this link has been posted before. But you and any others who use paypal should check it out.

Ok, this is not what I am looking for as it is not an issue with a frozen account. I have seen related sites and I have heard stories from both sides.

I bring this up becuase I have for long wondered why people leave halfway through without making a payment or tell that they could not complete the payment and this may be a real issue.

What I mentioned in my post is something I noticed today (though I was aware of it before) when testing a payment. It took me 3 failed attempts because of the confusion between a zero and letter O. The worst part about it is that it returns back to the form "but does not say what the error was and why it is not completing the payment process".

That is the issue I would like to discuss and may be bring it to the attention of paypaldamon. I hope there is nothing wrong with pointing out problems and discussing them so it it makes sense to paypal to have a look at it and fix it so more people might use them?

Why is this important? Because, I for one use paypal on more than one site for payment acceptance. It is not to discredit them but to have them make it better.

Can you simply cut-and-paste the code on the browser or your e-mail and put it into whatever field is demanding it? That kind of skips the whole 0/O (zero vs. "O") issue.
Lurleene,

No, because it is an image not text and hence you have to enter the code in the form field. On my 3 attempts I had zeros or "O". So, first I typed zero and on the second attempt I typed the letter and on the third attempt the letter again and on the fourth attempt it was all letters so there was no problem. It sounds silly but if you look at the image you can not tell the difference between the two. Also, the image has a blurry plaid background which makes it even worse.

Originally posted by Gurudev
It sounds silly but if you look at the image you can not tell the difference between the two.

Not silly at all. When I first got a paypal account I didn't have any 0 or O to worry about, but over the years I have had that issue elsewhere - mainly registration codes for software. Hemera Photo Objects is a great case in point. The first part of the serial number is is a three digit code PO5 - I assumed it was for Photo Objects (the PO part) and it was. However with the typeface they use it could have easily been P05 instead.

Remember the good old days when zeros all had a line through them? Maybe they could look at using that to increase the ease of use.

Greg Moore

One thing that bugs me is how many times I've had to verify myself to get my money - I must have done it 10 times now