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“Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

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Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#61
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Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#62
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd like you to point out the law that says all contracts have to be written. With a few specific exceptions, they don't. Sure, you should get them in writing and signed to cover your ass, but an email contract is still perfectly valid in most cases. Just like a "handshake agreement" can be legally binding.

Which country are you referring to? In France this is not the case. If there is a disagreement and nothing is written down you're screwed. edit: I've checked up a bit. There is such a thing as "oral contract" in French law but it's very strict and limited to certain transactions. The legal definition of contract doesn't say if it must be written or not ( http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichCodeArticle.do?cidTexte=...…

In the United States, you can form a contract in pretty much any medium. Even oral contracts are respected, and certainly an email contract would be valid.

For certain types of contracts (especially regarding real property, like cars and houses) you need a written agreement.

France might have different rules.

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#63
post #54
post #4

I've had similar problems with Paypal accounts in the past too. Although it's an absolute joke I have found they only respond to formal legal threats. At one point they limited my account, with a couple of grand in it, in the same way (nothing in, nothing out, wait 180 days). So I sent them a letter basically saying "release my money or your staring down the barrel of a legal gun" and listed a whole load of lost earn…

It's actually not so terribly dumb. The point here is to prevent fraud. People who take the time to credibly threaten legal action are, I strongly suspect, much less likely to be engaged in fraud. Real criminals would just walk away from the cash (lest they attract more attention) and put up another site on another PayPal account. It's more than just squeaky wheel syndrome -- PayPal is using the context of your commu…

sure, but it also cripples small businesses who don't really know any better. not every small-time merchant will have the wits about them to present legal threats.

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#64
post #7

What's an alternative to PayPal then?

Google Checkout, Amazon Payments, 2Checkout, Authorize.net, and other cc processors. Or get a merchant account.

What about best alternatives for merchants outside of the US/Europe?

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#65
post #63
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's actually not so terribly dumb. The point here is to prevent fraud. People who take the time to credibly threaten legal action are, I strongly suspect, much less likely to be engaged in fraud. Real criminals would just walk away from the cash (lest they attract more attention) and put up another site on another PayPal account. It's more than just squeaky wheel syndrome -- PayPal is using the context of your commu…

sure, but it also cripples small businesses who don't really know any better. not every small-time merchant will have the wits about them to present legal threats.

Dunno, a legal threat is the first thing that came to my mind. I don't see a situation where someone collects money from your customers and refuses to give it to you any different from someone walking into your home, smashing your piggy bank, and taking your money. The second case is obviously a crime, so it follows that the first is too. When you are a victim of a crime, negotiating with the criminal seems like a bad idea. Getting a lawyer (or the cops) involved seems like a good idea.

So if I lost my "appeal" at PayPal, I would involve the real legal system, instead of their made up one.

(OTOH, if the OP got all his money back, then he was not necessarily wronged. Banks can refuse to do business with companies they are unsure about.)

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#66
post #56

You may be able to avoid the biggest problem - which is money 'trapped' in the account by depositing all your funds, daily, into your bank account. Its called Daily Sweep. Wait, you've never heard of it? Oh yes, thats because not only is it -not- advertised or mentioned anywhere on the site but to activate the -option- it you need to call up on the phone! But its quite easy to do once you know about it. With your biz…

Yes, what is to stop PayPal from requesting all the funds back from your linked account? Can you ask your bank to prevent this?

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#67
I had a similar encounter of false accusation on Sedo.com trying to sell a domain. They apparently had "definitive" evidence of shilling and closed the sale. When I asked what that evidence was, they said the buyer had the same name as I did. Maybe it was bad luck, but who'd be dumb enough to shill with his own name anyways. It's not so much that I lost the sale that bothers me, but that the lady in Germany still thinks I was trying to shill. Perhaps I should have threatened to pursue legal action?

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#68

Wondering if anyone has a success story with PayPal?

It's been working for me. I sell a little Mac shareware app that pulls in about 3k per year (not very much). Paypal was nice to interface too (especially with CPAN's Business::PayPal::IPN). I set the whole automated registration thing up in a few hours.

I've had a couple of charge backs and those irk me to no end. Paypal always sides with the purchaser because software is intangible. I've been tempted to mail out postcards with the license code on them so that I can claim I sent something tangible out, but it seems like too much of a hassle to be worth it (it really only happens about once per year). I ended up solving the charge back problem in a technical way anyway.

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#69
post #56

You may be able to avoid the biggest problem - which is money 'trapped' in the account by depositing all your funds, daily, into your bank account. Its called Daily Sweep. Wait, you've never heard of it? Oh yes, thats because not only is it -not- advertised or mentioned anywhere on the site but to activate the -option- it you need to call up on the phone! But its quite easy to do once you know about it. With your biz…

Yes, what is to stop PayPal from requesting all the funds back from your linked account? Can you ask your bank to prevent this?

Bank accounts are free. I have my personal account, my business account and a "throwaway" account I use only for PayPal funds. When my PayPal balance gets over a few hundred $$, I manually transfer to the throwaway account and then to the business account. They can't touch the business account because (a) they don't know about it and (b) they have no authorization to touch it, so if they somehow managed to withdraw funds, I'd be at the local branch the next day screaming at the bank manager.

Make no bones about it, banks take unauthorized withdrawals very seriously!

Re: “Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

#70
post #6

I suspect that PayPal is the payment processor of choice for all crooks and scammers. Thus, choosing them as your payment processor is risking your business reputation - they will always default to treating their customers with suspicion and if they have your cash in their coffers then they will sit on it given any excuse to be "suspicious" - that's the business model they operate within. While the cost of processing…

The one advantage paypal has is the fact that it isolates your site from credit card numbers. If I go to some podunk site to buy something I almost always choose the paypal option even if they have a merchant account set up. Why? Because with paypal I end up authenticated with paypal.com and I know that no important info is passing through to the podunk site's servers.

Otherwise I'm entering my credit card number into their site and I have no way of knowing how good or crappy their security is. I'm basically having to trust them not to do something stupid like store it in their DB, or mail it plaintext to their order processing guy, or some other brain dead thing.

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