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How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

blog.vayable.com

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Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#11

Post by Anechoic »

zaidf wrote: post #4
thinkcomp wrote: post #2

I've been resisting the urge to market my startup as a PayPal alternative, because we're really focused on payments for in-person retail sales (largely to avoid competing with PayPal), but this is probably the fifth or sixth PayPal-froze-my-account posting I've seen on Hacker News and they all seem to garner enormous amounts of sympathy from readers. We've also built all of the infrastructure you'd need to do interne…

The most important service: instant money transfer (mostly) irrespective of physical location. I had one use-case this week where paypal would not work. I needed to withdraw the amount I was to be paid by my client and paypal has a $400/day ATM limit. So I asked the client to see if he can pay directly to my bank. The obvious solution is wire. Of course, my client happens to be in a state that didn't have his busines…

> paypal has a $400/day ATM limit.

A PayPal tech support person told me a trick to get around this limitation: get a second debit card.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#12

Post by jarin »

zavulon wrote: post #3

> PayPal doesn’t want their cut of tens of millions of dollars of revenue we project in the next two years. Any idea of who does? Get a real merchant account and a payment gateway. I recommend Authorize.NET. Get it from one of the re-sellers, it's cheaper than getting it directly from them. There are no shortcuts: you have to compare different vendors, do your research on what all the fees mean and who offers the bes…

Braintree is also great, and way more developer-friendly than Authorize.NET.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#13

Post by true_religion »

rfugger wrote: post #10
URSpider94 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point, I'd agree that this would seem to align with what PayPal is alleging in their letter. However, it does also seem that Airbnb, which they mention as a comparison, is doing the same thing -- Airbnb is serving as an aggregator for its individual lodging vendors, and THEY offer PayPal as an option ... Any Airbnb folks still here on HN who could explain if they've gotten around this particular hurdl…

In the article, Paypal's letter doesn't say you're not allowed to be an aggregator, just that you're not allowed to be an aggregator that lets merchants get around Paypal's acceptable use rules. Maybe Airbnb has assured Paypal that it does not let merchants circumvent these rules.

Airbnb allows only one kind of "merchant"---the type who wants to offer living space for you.

This product on the other hand lets anyone offer "experiences". To put it lightly, you could have someone offer the "experience of sex" (illegal) or the "experience of touring the porn studios of the San Fernando Valley" (legal but against Paypal AUP).

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#14

Post by pitdesi »

zavulon wrote: post #3

> PayPal doesn’t want their cut of tens of millions of dollars of revenue we project in the next two years. Any idea of who does? Get a real merchant account and a payment gateway. I recommend Authorize.NET. Get it from one of the re-sellers, it's cheaper than getting it directly from them. There are no shortcuts: you have to compare different vendors, do your research on what all the fees mean and who offers the bes…

helpful plug- Check out http://FeeFighters.com. We compare the different processors for you and cut the BS fees and there are NO contracts/cancellation fees (we started out as a blog to help merchants understand how to not get ripped off). Like zavulon says, auth.net is a highly recommended gateway (and works with nearly all processors)

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#15

Post by thaumaturgy »

I have less than no sympathy for businesses with Paypal horror stories at this point. Paypal's reputation is very well known, especially in startup circles, and there are a ton of other services available that will handle payments for startups. There have been several HN threads about them, and it's not too hard to find those on searchyc.com.

If you're starting a business, and you're relying on Paypal to do it, then you're foolishly adding totally unnecessary risk to your business.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#16

Post by InclinedPlane »

If anyone thinks they can set up online payment processing system that accepts payments from credit cards, debit cards, echecks, and direct debit transfers worldwide easier and with less hassle than paypal then they should do that. As it happens there are some very real niches where paypal has almost no significant competition.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#17

Post by hardy263 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #15

I have less than no sympathy for businesses with Paypal horror stories at this point. Paypal's reputation is very well known, especially in startup circles, and there are a ton of other services available that will handle payments for startups. There have been several HN threads about them, and it's not too hard to find those on searchyc.com. If you're starting a business, and you're relying on Paypal to do it, then…

Unfortunately, most of these payment handlers only allow US companies to use their services. I'm in Canada, and I've been trying to find said services, and every one that I've found using searchyc only accepts US companies. Some of them say that international services is "in the works" or "available sometime in the future", but business cannot wait.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#19

Post by imx »

Take the same approach as grubwith.us and groupon did, avoid the PayPal risk.

However, if you believe there's a significant advantage of having PayPal (doubt it), then you may want to consider setting up an eBay store and handle all payments for reservations through BINs on ebay pages... vayable.com would then become a "wrapper" around your ebay store. Additionally if you get significant traction, you may get $10-40 for every person who registers with ebay through your links.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#20

Post by cookiecaper »

zavulon wrote: post #3

> PayPal doesn’t want their cut of tens of millions of dollars of revenue we project in the next two years. Any idea of who does? Get a real merchant account and a payment gateway. I recommend Authorize.NET. Get it from one of the re-sellers, it's cheaper than getting it directly from them. There are no shortcuts: you have to compare different vendors, do your research on what all the fees mean and who offers the bes…

This is still not really a good option. Have you looked at the contracts and requirements on payment processors? The options suck. Credit cards are a bad, bad system for merchants because the banks totally have everyone by the balls and in typical bank fashion they are not afraid to put the squeeze on.

I hope one day someone comes up with a real electronic payment method. Bitcoins are currently our best hope, but they're not a very good hope.

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