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If you accept bitcoin, then there is no third party that can freeze your account.
Praytell, what venue accepts payment in bitcoin?
This is not in the least bit ironic.
> "I knew PayPal couldn't be trusted, but I used them anyway, and they shafted me, just like I thought they would!" He only froze my money because he loves me, he won't do it again, I promise!
> WHY From my experience in the UK it's the only option for accepting payment that doesn't have the serious admin and financial outlay of getting set up with a proper merchant account. Perhaps in this case going with EventBrite from the beginning would have made more sense but that's only an easy call to make in hindsight. Edit: You seem to have changed your comment. Consider this a reply to the underlying message of…
Paypal also has terrible customer service. Every time I call them, I get pushed around to people who barely speak English, and just repeat things they see on a sheet of paper. To add to this, think about charge backs. Paypal doesn't even make an effort to fight for you, in the case of a Charge Back. I had a charge back NINE months after a transaction for 2 $500 amounts. Ouch. The worst part is... if you want to dispu…
Paypal classes events as high-risk transactions (as they require people to pay upfront often far in advance of the event) so you're at much more risk of being suspended if you breach their risk thresholds. Imagine if you're a fraudster, you've knocked up a fake event and you've sold $10k-$20k in tickets, you could withdraw the money and disappear before the date of the event. Now Paypal are on the hook for the money,…
1) Have a written statement of the criteria for freezing funds, demanding a 100% reserve, etc.. Make the criteria concrete and objective enough that business owners can reliably predict whether this will happen to them.
2) Notify account holders of this policy in a very conspicuous way. Burying it in the TOS isn't good enough for something like this.
It's fine if PayPal wants to be strict about business models it deems high-risk. But they should do a much better job of managing customers' expectations. Right now, it seems that most customers find out about PayPal's draconian risk management practices by unexpectedly losing their cash flow or by hearing from someone else who did. That's unacceptable.
It's been said before, but it's worth repeating. Conferences are a high risk business operation. For every SXSW, there's a thousand "Learn to Buy Real Estate with No Money Down" conferences at the Ramada Inn next to the airport. Paypal is not in the business of assuming your risk. They are in the business of processing payments while mitigating their own.
Whatever happened to "caveat emptor"? If you're attending a real estate conference at a Ramada Inn, you weren't defrauded - you're just an idiot.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then PayPal should provide a way to pre-mitigate the risk. For instance, they could require a bond before ticket sales start. Rather than screwing legitimate users, there are other ways to solve this problem. The short is that PayPal just doesn't care about small users. If they did, these problems would be solved.
Paypal is primarily about small users, they're a long tail business. Any large business would just get a merchant account. What Paypal is however is a mass-market product aimed at low-risk transactions. They don't care about dealing with special case high-risk transactions, that's a fundamentally different business model which they don't want to go after. It's perfectly reasonable for Paypal to decide their own busin…
The same could be said for just about every other business that fails.
And I don't believe that is reasonable to freeze transactions of business based solely on some sort of suspicion of guilt, then after it has been resolved that they are indeed innocent, continue to hold their money for months after the fact.
The horror stories of paypay have been floating around for some years, this story is nothing new.
Paypal also has terrible customer service. Every time I call them, I get pushed around to people who barely speak English, and just repeat things they see on a sheet of paper. To add to this, think about charge backs. Paypal doesn't even make an effort to fight for you, in the case of a Charge Back. I had a charge back NINE months after a transaction for 2 $500 amounts. Ouch. The worst part is... if you want to dispu…
Do you have an account manager? If not, you may want to request one. Our experience with PayPal has been fine since we started directing inquiries through our AM vs normal support.
I certainly would have dropped paypal long ago if it were not for our account rep.
We use Eventbrite for all our Entrepreneurs Unpluggd events, and while they're not multi-day conferences, I still think Eventbrite is the best platform for any size event to use for ticket sales, registration, waiting list, and all that jazz. Never once had an issue with them on any level. And no, I don't work for them or get paid by them in any way. They just have a kick ass product. :) EDIT: The reason I'm even say…
EventBrite lets you use your own PayPal account. http://www.eventbrite.com/paypal-info
Maybe EventBrite should warn its users about PayPal's policies.