Incredibly poor performance on paypal sandbox (aka paypal sandbox sucks)

So some folks have complained about the paypal sandbox and the performance on the forums. PayPal has been our primary processor primarily because of its international coverage and decent api's. We set up most of this a couple years back and other than periodic testing, have not really used it too much. However with the 2.0 restructuring, we introduced a few bugs in the process and spent a bit more time on the paypal sandbox than normal. Kinda sad to see how such a large company like here, and here. In the past our experience with paypal customer support has been quite bad, with folks there refusing to acknowledge / investigate the paypal / soap / php 5.2.x issues we've had with recent 1.x versions. Maybe its time we expanded our options and think of using another payment processor as our primary one. Its too bad that Google Checkout does not support recurring contributions. In general we avoid ranting on such stuff, but this one was a bit over the top and needed some attention :)

Comments

I know this would require programming for a new payment processor, but have you considered Yourpay.com? They provide recurring payment functionality...
A.J.

Could they be better to focus on? Though it took me 2 weeks to get a sales person to even kinda help and even then it only worked because we used a reseller who was very
helpful.

I've had the same experience with their sandbox, both testing CiviCRM and other ecommerce tools. It's incredibly unreliable.

I complained enough to tech support (which is another topic to rant on) that their most recent response included this info:

QUOTE
due to the issues we experience with sandbox, I recommend to just use beta sandbox for now.
Bear in mind that you will need to create a Beta Developer Central account as well as Beta Sandbox PayPal accounts.

The URL to the Beta Developer Central is: https://beta-developer.paypal.com/
The URL for the Beta Sandbox is: https://www.beta-sandbox.paypal.com/
END QUOTE

I have not had a chance to actually check it out yet, but it would appear they're in the process of building a new sandbox, which is usable to some degree. You might want to try it and see if you get better luck.

-Brian

PayPal Sandbox has sucked for a long time. I remember trying to develop a donation tool with sandbox about 4 years ago, and performance was so slow you couldn't tell whether your script was working or not. You think this would be a top priority for them.

--
John Forsythe
DrupalModules.com

Paypal's sandbox makes me want to cry in 2011. How could they degrade their service to produce a page with only the words "Fatal Failure" or other pages with 500 Internal Server Errors. If it weren't for my customer I would use something else.