More Paypal nonsense • Hacker News Board

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#71

Post by saurik » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:13 AM UTC

asto wrote: post #65

saurik wrote: post #62

"Donate" has a very specific meaning, at least in the US, and comes with numerous accounting connotations, including the ability to write off the expense. As many people don't realize that "charitable donations" do /not/ include "donations" to purchase toys for children, it is misleading to use the term "donation" in this circumstance. Meanwhile, often the person /accepting/ the donations doesn't understand this eith…

The money donated is used by the non-profit to purchase products that are then given away to needy kids. This is donation whichever way you look at it. Amazon will let you do this but people generally specify who they want the product to go to which makes it a gift purchased for friends/family. So it qualifies as a purchase there.

"used by the non-profit" <- I'm sorry, maybe I'm confused, but as far as I know there are no "non-profits" involved here; which entity are you speaking of here?

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#72

Post by 8plot » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:15 AM UTC

jfruh wrote: post #30

Yikes, are you really only allowed to use "donate" buttons if you're a nonprofit? I use them as a "tip jar" on my blog. What's the options for for-profit when you're giving money for nothing in particular?

Bitcoin is an option.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#73

Post by einhverfr » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:15 AM UTC

saurik wrote: post #62

"Donate" has a very specific meaning, at least in the US, and comes with numerous accounting connotations, including the ability to write off the expense. As many people don't realize that "charitable donations" do /not/ include "donations" to purchase toys for children, it is misleading to use the term "donation" in this circumstance. Meanwhile, often the person /accepting/ the donations doesn't understand this eith…

I don't see how Paypal is liable for taxes collected, so I don't see how that should concern them.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#74

Post by wdewind » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:15 AM UTC

asto wrote: post #65

saurik wrote: post #62

"Donate" has a very specific meaning, at least in the US, and comes with numerous accounting connotations, including the ability to write off the expense. As many people don't realize that "charitable donations" do /not/ include "donations" to purchase toys for children, it is misleading to use the term "donation" in this circumstance. Meanwhile, often the person /accepting/ the donations doesn't understand this eith…

The money donated is used by the non-profit to purchase products that are then given away to needy kids. This is donation whichever way you look at it. Amazon will let you do this but people generally specify who they want the product to go to which makes it a gift purchased for friends/family. So it qualifies as a purchase there.

PayPal does not let you ship items to addresses that are not the billing address. General policy, in their TOS, no surprises. OP is also not a registered non profit, though the real issue doesn't really have anything to do with the charitable nature of it.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#75

Post by wdewind » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:18 AM UTC

joshu wrote: post #59

wdewind wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because in reality paypal is actually pretty awesome (note: I work for Etsy which uses paypal as a payment processor, so I guess I'm kind of biased). The cost for the business, compared to maintaining your own payments platform at scale, is pretty reasonable, and the failure rate is pretty miniscule when you consider the amount of potential fraud that goes through the platform. Paypal wasn't really designed to handle…

IIRC Paypal was originally designed for interpersonal payments.

TBH you might be correct. I don't think that's what is currently optimized for, but even there, it still works pretty damn well. Haters gonna hate...

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#76

Post by hokua » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:18 AM UTC

brianr wrote: post #3

These horror stories are so common that I have to ask: why does anyone still use PayPal? I ask this in the most constructive way possible... is there a set of use-cases that PayPal is still the best for? Is it a lack of awareness of alternatives? International availability? Something else?

Im guessing this rant was submitted and upvoted by the developers of Stripe. Paypal works.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#77

Post by amorphid » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:19 AM UTC

It looks like PayPal's site for creating a donatiom button makes it really easy to get yourself into trouble...

https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_donate-intro-outside

I don't see anything on that page to suggest you have to be a nonprofit or somehow a worthy cause. They optimize their web page for encouraging people to create a donation button and then provide you with a shitty experience on the back-end if you make a mistake. They aren't trying very hard to keep you from hurting yourself. This is why government creates consumer protection laws, so maybe PayPal needs a big warning label next next the link encouraging you to create a donation button.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#78

Post by 8plot » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:20 AM UTC

knightgj wrote: post #9

I'll be looking at alternatives after receiving the friendly "We reviewed your account and determined that there's a relatively higher than average risk of future transaction issues" email that states they'll be holding my money for 21 days... I have never made a claim. I have never had a claim filed against me. My account receives maybe $500/year, tops. I send $500/year, tops. HUDGE risk of transaction issues.

Have you considered using bitcoin? If you have considered, but dismissed it, would you mind answering why bitcoin wouldn't work for your business?

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#79

Post by saurik » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:21 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #69

saurik wrote: post #62

"Donate" has a very specific meaning, at least in the US, and comes with numerous accounting connotations, including the ability to write off the expense. As many people don't realize that "charitable donations" do /not/ include "donations" to purchase toys for children, it is misleading to use the term "donation" in this circumstance. Meanwhile, often the person /accepting/ the donations doesn't understand this eith…

>In this case, this person obviously doesn't get it. "Why? These are my customers!" You seem to be confusing different things. After being unable to use donations, they tried to use sales. And paypal said no. That's the context of what you're quoting, after donations had been given up on.

This all seems to have happened during the course of the same conversation, and reading more of their blog history I don't see them saying that they then actually used a Buy Now button for any period of time.

Regardless, once the conversation started going farther in that direction, the issue did change (and I did not touch on that part of the problem); specifically, it became entirely surrounding "purchasing products sent to a different shipping address than the one the buyer specified during checkout", which is apparently against PayPal's terms of service.

(Note: I have not personally verified that it is against PayPal's terms of service, but I have no reason not to believe the employee of Etsy, a company that relies quite strongly on PayPal and certainly has gone down this road numerous times with them while determining what features they can offer to customers, who posted elsewhere in this thread [1].)

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318223

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#80

Post by einhverfr » Tue, Dec 06, 2011, 6:21 AM UTC

DanI-S wrote: post #14

bphogan wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because buyers keep demanding sellers use it. If you're a buyer, it's about the most painless thing out there. I got forced into it by a client once for that very reason. Unfortunately PyPal froze his account with about $20k in it. We switched to a real merchant account and everything went uphill from there.

Is there a current best alternative to PayPal that you would recommend?

You have two basic options: 1) A proper merchant gateway solution 2) A third party payment provider with better terms of service.

On the first, I have generally recommended TrustCommerce both due to their emphasis on security (having reviewed their Perl and PHP API classes directly) and the richness of services they provide. They do cost more because Paypal gets a tremendous volume discount, but it's an option. For online payments also you have additional PCI-DSS worries that are burdensome for small businesses.

The second option includes solutions like Amazon Payments. I currently use Amazon Payments because I process 4-5 transactions per year. At that volume it isn't worth maintaining my own merchant account and certainly is not worth worrying about PCI compliance......