It has been reported on the PayPal developer forum that since the recent UI redesign was released, paypal subscriptions have stopped working. That explains why I didn’t see any this week as usual.

Thanks for those few folks who initially posted about it and brought it to the level of attention it deserves. PayPal is one of the premier online payment gateways, that allow buyers and sellers to coordinate payment without divulging sensitive information to each other.

There are only a handful of players in this arena, and I personally have tried 2CO with a mostly disappointing user experience. I sought a secondary payment gateway to PayPal because some of my clients were not served by PayPal because of geographical location. 2CO has a lot of potential — the homepage looks great, but after logging in I was ultimately disappointed in how ugly and un-intuitive the UI is. On the bright side 2CO is one of the few that offer a recurring subscription billing service aside from PayPal.

PayPal has had its share of broken releases, the earliest I recall was October of 2004. There also has been press lately about PayPal’s new logo and user interface re-design.

It is great to see a major online player take on standards web design after many years of encouragement by the developer and web design community.

As I check my account I noticed that PayPal has removed the beta testing of the new user interface completely and reverted back to the original design that has been in place for years. This raises the question of how long the subscription bug has been live…perhaps more than one push?