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We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

blog.niteo.co

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Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#43

PayPal will also stop letting you refund the percent they take out so you will be holding the bag when you refund a customer. There is absolutely no reason to use PayPal at this point and any place that only takes paypal should be boycotted.

I dislike PayPal as much as the next guy, but I don't get this: > PayPal will also stop letting you refund the percent they take out so you will be holding the bag when you refund a customer. When I refund a customer, I wouldn't expect the power company to refund the electricity spent serving that customer, and I wouldn't expect UPS/FedEx to refund the delivery of that customer's package. Why should PayPal refund the…

Also PayPal is not alone in this practice. Many credit card processors when using bundled and fixed fee pricing also don't return transaction fees when you issue a refund. For example Stripe.

A good reason to get interchange plus pricing from your CC processor.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#44

The lack of customer service in the Silicon Valley is a pervasive problem. * Cody Don on YouTube teaches the masses about science and regularly gets banned. His videos are rated G to PG. Despite millions of viewers and dollars of Revenue, there is nobody he can call. * Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it. * Lose your Instagram/Twitter/Gmail? Too bad, be…

> * Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it.

And here I thought small claims court was a thing in the US as well

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#45
post #22

Even though I absolutely agree that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, it is ultimately the market that could drive you towards a dependency situation. I have had a couple of customers for which I set up both PP and another PSP (such as stripe). Then it turned out that about 90% of their transactions came from PP. So even if I set up 10 different PSPs for them, if PP bans them, they will still be out of b…

That doesn't necessarily follow. It shows that users prefer PayPal, but not that they wouldn't use alternatives if PayPal's not available. If they really want to know the answer, they could do an A/B test with missing PayPal and see how many people drop out without it. Also, was PP the default/first payment option by any chance?

>If they really want to know the answer, they could do an A/B test with missing PayPal and see how many people drop out without it.

I've done these tests, repeatedly; removing the PayPal payments option consistently leads to a statistically significant increase in cart abandonment. Some customers strongly prefer PayPal (especially on unfamiliar sites) and some don't have a credit card.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#46
As ar as I know PayPal in Europe is a bank with a Luxembourg banking license.

I'm wondering if they could pull the same shitty here. Considering that any bank, which freezes your account, doesn't provide you with any reason and actually refuses to talk to you may draw quite some ire from their respecive regulator.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#47
I used to help run a rather large fan convention. For our first 5 years (starting in about late 2003 or so), PayPal was the only option we offered for registering online. At the time, they were really the only option for implementing online payments easily without the complexity of a full merchant stack (and it was just me doing the programming, volunteering to help them while I was still in college). By the time we finally switched away from them, we were probably clearing $80k or so a year through them, with a very large percentage of that coming over the course of a week or so just before the event. People like to wait until the last minute. :)

We never had any issues, but we were very vigilant about transferring funds out of PayPal every few days just in case. We did finally stop using them, probably about 2009 or 2010, when stories like OP's started to become widespread.

For us, having them "hold" our funds for 6 months or cancelling our account would have bankrupted us. The hotel wants to be paid on Monday after the event. Vendors need to be paid within 30 days. Things like that would have been impossible for us to do if they decided to sit on the money or can us. We were a volunteer fan convention; we didn't have the financial cushion to withstand something like that.

Not to mention the fees were higher than a standard merchant account. We finally did switch to a merchant account through Elavon and, after I left, I think they switched to Stripe. Either way, they don't accept PayPal now because the financial risk to them that could result from PayPal freezing or canceling the funds is significant.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#48
post #22

Even though I absolutely agree that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, it is ultimately the market that could drive you towards a dependency situation. I have had a couple of customers for which I set up both PP and another PSP (such as stripe). Then it turned out that about 90% of their transactions came from PP. So even if I set up 10 different PSPs for them, if PP bans them, they will still be out of b…

That doesn't necessarily follow. It shows that users prefer PayPal, but not that they wouldn't use alternatives if PayPal's not available. If they really want to know the answer, they could do an A/B test with missing PayPal and see how many people drop out without it. Also, was PP the default/first payment option by any chance?

Not parent but been there done that. Merely moving PayPal out from first / default choice to alternative translates to lost sales.

Until you're big and known enough buyers don't trust you, but they trust PayPal.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#49
post #10

This and similar behavior is what ultimately drives people toward decentralized solutions, like Bitcoin for example.

In what fantasy world will a majority of companies go "Fine, I'm going to stop accepting credit cards, and rely solely on *Coin"?

The same fantasy world that according to some people should not have had any need for more than 5 computers worldwide. ;)

https://www.pcworld.com/article/155984/worst_tech_prediction...

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#50

The lack of customer service in the Silicon Valley is a pervasive problem. * Cody Don on YouTube teaches the masses about science and regularly gets banned. His videos are rated G to PG. Despite millions of viewers and dollars of Revenue, there is nobody he can call. * Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it. * Lose your Instagram/Twitter/Gmail? Too bad, be…

> Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it.

Your bank. You dispute the charge. Uber can deal with your bank. It doesn't matter it was a debit card. It means you're missing the money immediately, but doesn't stop you from disputing.

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