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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#52
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In fact, it's a bit weird he didn't immediately refund the unexpected payment. Was he hoping to exploit the mistake and keep the money?

Bad idea. If you did that you could end up paying back the money twice, once for your own payment and another for paypal's own refund.

This is incorrect and not how paypal handles refunds.

This is merchant 101: always refund suspicious payments before your payment processor has to do it, it'd be really bizarre if Paypal was somehow the only exception in the industry.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#53
I just got an invoice from Google Account. Basically, scammers send people invoices stating that they exceeded their 5GB and people have to pay $120 not to lose their Google account. I'm sure there are tons of rich idiots who will pay $120, but I wonder why:

- There was no merchant contact info. They managed to upload Google's logo and use Google Account as the merchant name. Isn't PayPal doing any basic blacklist check, etc. or check against stock logos (there are tons of companies now, which provide logo by provided company name).

- There's not way to report the invoice as scam attempt - I can only "cancel" or "archive", which sends the "merchant" an email and they can know that my email belong to a valid PayPal account after that as the email is sent by PayPal.

In general, after so many in business, PayPal is a lazy, slow, and stupid company. I am sorry to say that, but it's the truth. Their developers are a bunch of old timers, who have entrenched into the company and there's no innovation going on. There are many, many, many complains about PayPal, which I can list here. Most of the are very simple to spot and fix by PayPal, but, no, they are untouched for years.

I feel like their dev teams is maybe a dozen people who just do maintenance of critical issues and that's it. Their recent interface upgrade took years and it still sucks and feels like in the dawn of DotCom. Compare PayPal to Stripe, let's say - there's no room for comparison! Stripe innovates at a huge pace, they provide a much better DX (Developer Experience), and are so much nicer to work with!

PayPal recently acquired Xoom - a very expensive and shady money transfer company. Compared to TransferWise, they are a total joke. In general, I think PayPal is managed by technological morons!

P.S. PayPal Here is also a disaster compared to the rest. I bought the device (as PayPal gives nonprofit discounts like Stripe but unlike Square) and many of our transactions failed, so, we switched back to Square. Now we're integrating with Stripe's reader, so, we'll get the best of both.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#56
post #40

Very weird case. The person got angry even though it was not his money to begin with. Absolutely no harm was caused to him. The person demanded explanation why an erroneous amount of money visited his account. Yet it's none of his business. There was a moment in this incident where any reasonable person would have just moved on.

Wrong. He got upset because he wasn’t notified of the refund. Notification of deducted money is something that is quite reasonable to expect. In this case he was trying to figure out what to do, it was handled by others, and a notification would have let him know that it was handled.

Yeah, what if he had refunded it manually then it would have been refunded twice.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#57
post #36
post #4

This is standard PayPal. They don’t give a crap about their merchants and it’s been widely documented in the past. See https://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+horror+stories

Can you name some payment processors which do care about their smaller merchants?

Stripe. We moved most of our payment processing from Paypal to Stripe last year, they're unbelievably more competent (an extrapolation from the quality of the tooling and APIs) and actually respond with meaningful input when a problem arises.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#58

I avoid PayPal, but in the rare case where there is no other payment method possible and i really need something, i simply create an account, do the transaction, and immediately delete the Paypal account again. I find this the best way to deal with them :)

I once closed my account only for it to be re-opened 4-5 months later by them with a debt balance assigned.

Long story short is that someone I'd previously transacted with owed them money so they determined that they would take it from my account and recover it from me.

I complained the Financial Ombudsman in the UK. They agreed with my position that it was unreasonable for me to be held financially accountable for people I've transacted with indefinitely.

Paypal stuck to the line that "You cannot close your account in order to avoid a debt". Despite the fact that I had no debt, except the one they assigned me several months after account closure, out of nowhere.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#59
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you work for merchantinc.com? They seem to own and operate paypalsucks.org and have a history of advertising themselves with forum spam similar to your comment.

Nope, but I spent 2 years trying to make Paypal explain why they disabled my account, but even they didn't know. This was about 15 years ago, and back then this was the first Google result when you searched for "Paypal complaint".

The same happened to me. 10 years ago my personal account was frozen. They requested additional verification. Getting any information on why my account was suddenly frozen lead to nothing. Paypal was not able or willing to explain to me what caused this issue.

This was the moment I decided I did want to do any further business with them.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#60
post #57
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name some payment processors which do care about their smaller merchants?

Stripe. We moved most of our payment processing from Paypal to Stripe last year, they're unbelievably more competent (an extrapolation from the quality of the tooling and APIs) and actually respond with meaningful input when a problem arises.

I use Stripe, the support is certainly better than Paypals but it's not like they'll do anything to keep your business if they consider you a risk.
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