Getting MIPS into the Resolution Center

When I first came over to PayPal, I was flummoxed by some of the emails I received from members that told me that their PayPal claims weren’t appearing in their Resolution Center. The only way the members learned about the claims was through email. How could they not be appearing in the Res Center? I thought to myself. Could it be a bug?

I took a couple of the emails along with me on a trip out to PayPal’s operations team in Omaha
and had the folks in the know fill me in. In almost every case, the claim in question was over what was called a “multi-item purchase” (or MIPS). That’s where a buyer purchases multiple items from a seller on eBay and pays for them with a single PayPal payment.

MIPS resolutions are complex
From a resolution perspective, it’s not hard to see why resolving those kind of cases is complex. Say the buyer purchases 8 different items, and the seller ships them in 3 different boxes. Maybe one of the boxes doesn’t arrive, and one of the items that does arrive is different than what the buyer expected. So for one PayPal payment, we may have three INR (Item Not Received) claims, one SNAD (Significantly Not as Described) claim, and four items that have no problems.

The PayPal claims process just wasn’t able to handle a complex case like that. The process was all based around a single item – so for instance, the claim had to be either INR or SNAD, not both. And what about multiple tracking numbers for the three packages?  The process couldn’t handle that.  And what if one item was a bowling ball and the others were beanie babies—there’s only one shipping amount, so how do we figure what portion of the shipping should be refunded to cover the return of one item out of the eight? You start to see how complicated it can all be.

The way PayPal handled MIPS in the past was to work the claim manually. So when the buyer filed the claim, we’d look it up on eBay and see it was a multi-item purchase, and then pull it out of the automated queue. Then we’d work the case by hand, notifying the members of progress through email. Of course, this led to much frustration, as emails can get blocked by spam filters (which lead to time outs and claim defaults), and members couldn’t see MIPS cases in their Resolution Center, so they always had to keep one eye on their inboxes to ensure they didn’t miss a MIPS case.

We needed a better way... and it's here now
Everyone realized that this could not go on.  It was causing frustration and dissatisfaction for our members, and it was giving customer service a headache working all these cases by hand. So we decided to make fixing this problem a top priority, even though it was obvious to us that fixing the problem correctly was going to be an enormous challenge.

I’m very pleased that now, two years later, we’ve finally done it. Last week we launched the MIPS flow on PayPal, a dedicated flow that can handle even the most complex multi-item purchases without batting an eye. It took hundreds of days of development and quality assurance testing, and we thought through every little edge case we could devise. All of that work has paid off, too, as we’ve had no major bugs reported since the launch, and we’ve had hundreds of these cases come through without a hitch.

All your disputes are visible in the Resolution Center
Now sellers can rest assured that all of their disputes are visible in the Resolution Center. There’s no need to obsessively check in-boxes for wayward disputes or claims. (The other flows that used to be worked manually, ACH returns and fraud reversals, were also brought into the Resolution Center earlier this year.) This also means that all disputes and claims are also now visible in your Downloadable Dispute Report, so the DDR is now complete as well.

Huge kudos go out to the team that made this happen, from the pioneers who wrote the first specifications document back in 2004 to the developers, QA engineers, UI designers, and Project Managers who made MIPS a reality this past week. This closes a big hole in PayPal’s functionality, and while it will never get a splashy mention on the front page, it represents a real milestone for the platform.