I’ll make this very brief… mostly because I’m tired and ticked at two usual suspects.

Last week, I updated my PayPal profile, removing an old default address.
Tonight, I bought something on eBay. Used PayPal to checkout. Also used an eBay coupon.
To my chagrin, I noticed the transaction went through, with my old erroneous address as the shipping address. It was still an address in eBay, and wound up as the default (not my new default address).

Now I’m looking at having to waste $40 worth of time, to first fix the shipping address SNAFU, and then to get back a $19.20 coupon from eBay… all because eBay revived a dead address. This should not have happened.

PayPal should have removed the Confirmed status as soon as I disavowed the address in PayPal. That would have prevented eBay from completing the transaction.

Instead, PayPal re-certified my old (erroneous) address as active and confirmed. Theoretically, you could use this in nefarious ways to certify an incorrect address as Confirmed, by cross-site scripting PayPal and eBay. There may be some precautions preventing that… but if I was able to trip it up without trying… it doesn’t look good for the eBay-PayPal bridge API.

Note, I’m not faulting eBay for me missing this… I should have gone into the eBay-side of things and made sure that the old address was gone there too (though, eBay and PayPal now boast tight payment integration… not so tight here). And I should have noticed when PayPal didn’t relay this to eBay. But, I’m sure eBay won’t fix it… and I’ll have to email PayPal begging for the transaction credit to be re-applied to the new PayPal transaction.

I would advise PayPal to look into this, because I now have a transaction for a Confirmed address that should not be Confirmed.

And, I just realized this will also probably void my Bing cashback too… now I’m looking at $50 worth of time to recover $40…