Thomas Hampel

 19 March 2016
eBay and Paypal are two different companies now. Which is great for support teams because they can now fingerpoint at each other.
For me the fun started early December 2015 when I bought some stuff on ebay from a seller in China who only accepted Paypal.

3-2-1 and the problems started.
I bought the item and have used the "Pay now" button and a lightbox popup showed up where my credentials were requested.
Authentication failed with "Wrong username or password". Of course I was sure that my credentials were correct. And of course URL & SSL certificates were okay, so it was'nt a MTM attack.
Using the same credentials on www.paypal.com worked fine which confirmed my credentials are okay.

I tried over and over again with different browsers and even different computers but nothing worked. I remembered that I've had a similar problem before where I was able to work around the issue by using ebay.com instead of using our localized ebay.de for paypal to work. This time not even ebay.com worked.

Finally I opened a case at PayPal.
They said it is some sort of known bug which is caused by the way ebay and Paypal have integrate their platforms in Germany and other sites, the only site which has not been updated is Switzerland.
So I went to http://www.ebay.ch and to my surprise everything worked fine. A remakrable difference is the layout of the PayPal login dialog box that shows up when using "Pay Now"
For eBay Switzerland the old PayPal design showed up when logging on, while for all other sites the new design showed up.

Thank you Switzerland !!!
Message to eBay & PayPal :  A new fancy design is worth nothing if it doesnt work, so make sure to fix this annoying problem.