Comment by esskay
Comment by esskay 9 hours ago
I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.
Comment by esskay 9 hours ago
I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.
To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.
with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way. That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
> and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment).
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
> that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens)
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
If the merchant screws you on a transaction paid via IBAN transfer, how do you get your money back?
I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets.
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
They're not as openly shitty at least.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
Major browsers have been doing that for what, 10 years?
And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable.
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.