navigating the PayPal customer service maze

I use PayPal to process payments and implement the shopping cart on my website. Recently I got an order that went through with the sales tax incorrectly calculated. So I tried to contact them to find out the cause of this issue, as this would be having a major business impact if it continued on future transactions. 


My first attempt was via email, to which I got a reply saying that they have no access to my selling preferences, where the sales tax are set, so I should call a phone number to get better help. I called that number (long distance, no toll-free, FTW) jut to be placed on interminable holds and have suggested a ridiculous "solution", not applicable to the issue at hand. What pissed me off the most was the ease with which they brushed the whole thing aside, with no attempt to find the root cause of the problem.


I was pretty sure it was a bug on their side and what I needed was someone with some technical competence in investigating this. The good thing is that they have a developers' site, with a forum. Browsing through, I found a way to submit trouble tickets at https://www.paypal.com/mts. That's a very good way to reach the Merchant Technical Services. The nice thing was that within 5 minutes after my submission a reply came, apparently not automatic, acknowledging the issue and saying they are working on it. 

be careful when deleting web content

Until recently, when I was updating the inventory for www.negustore.com I used to delete old product pages, that I wasn't carrying any longer. To be honest, I didn't realize I was doing that, instead I discovered it through analytics.

So here I was, yanking out pages that were already indexed by Google, and sending incoming traffic to my custom 404 handler. After the required head-smack I changed my code to keep the product pages and change the availability to "not available" and remove the add to cart button. That's the sensible thing to do. Lots of people may still be interested in the product specs, even if they are not on sales anymore. Better yet I could add some adsense pointing to places that sells them.

Interesting thought, it'd be nice if adsense would give us more control to what's included in each ad block, e.g. product for sale, instead of redundant product info, in my case.

I'm still wondering, how does removing of pages that were previously indexed affect the overall page rank of the site. Common sense it tells it can't be good. The last thing a search engine wants is to send people over to broken links.

Same thing goes for moving things around, if possible don't do it, if there's no choice, use 302 permanent redirects handlers that still listen to the old URLs until they are removed from the indexes.