Comment by analog31
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.
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.