I hope Square buys Stripe, figures out the international bits, adds some features, and then starts eating away at PayPal's market share.
More Paypal nonsense
111–120 of 257 posts
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US you cannot run that company: if you accept money in exchange for goods (or even sometimes services), and are not a registered non-profit, you need to pay sales taxes on the sales, must declare any residual as income, and the people giving you the money cannot claim it as a write off. Regretsy is in the EU, not the US, but I don't believe that changes the point. In the EU, everything that is traded, whether…
I believe most people understand the difference between donating money to a "good cause" and making a tax-deductible donation to a registered charity. Making it difficult for an honest person to collect donations and forward the proceeds to the needy (where the donors have no expectation of any tangible good in return ), or forcing Boy Scouts to obtain a peddler's license to collect canned foods for a food bank, is s…
"Paypal has no legal or even formally self-elected responsibility ... "
Paypal may or may not have any legal responsibility there, it makes no difference.
I think a lot of people overlook the underlying business model of Paypal. They're betting they can do a better job of fraud prevention than the entrenched credit card processing industry, and by doing so they can offer credit card facilities to more (read "higher risk") people.
What that means is that if you do _anything_ that might be even tangentially related to things that look like credit card fraud, you're opening yourself up to all the well documented risks of having them stop you withdrawing money from your account for 180 days.
If you're doing anything other than delivering physical goods to credit card billing addresses via 3rd party trackable shipping, you need to make sure you're fully aware of the risks you're choosing to expose yourself to using Paypal. If you're using Paypal for donations, preorders, digital goods, downloads, conferences, consulting - anything where you can't give them a FedEx tracking number (or equivalent), you're opening yourself up to a world of hurt in the dispute resolution process.
Surely I'm not the only one who looks at almost all of these Paypal "horror stories" and thinks "Yep, I could have told them they had that coming."?
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#113Yikes, 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?
Elsewhere[1], saurik says he got some flak for using the "donate" button without being a non-profit. He suggests that changing the wording away from "donate" ("help out", "contribute to", "support" may all be ideas) solved the problem.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've yet to see a "PayPal horror story" that didn't fit into one of the "any payment processor in the world would consider this high risk and temporarily or permanently freeze the account" slots. If this discussion with the customer service rep did occur as written, it's the most ridiculous one I've seen yet, though. It's a major customer service fail even if the original reason for freezing the account was valid.
I have a client who is a payment processor who specializes in high risk transactions. Paypal is not. The problem though is that Paypals definition of risk can be overinclusive to the point of being arbitrary. When I had my account frozen, I was told it was because my wife had sent money to someone else who was accused of violating the ToS. So here we have an account suspended because someone from the same IP address…
"I don't envy Paypal's position here. However, their approaches are unprofessional at best..."
From one point of view, they're no more "unprofessional" with their customer service than Google. At least there was a phone number to call and a person to answer it - even if they were apparently not highly trained enough or authorized to solve the problem.
Paypal are trying to solve the credit card version of "web scale" - they've got their almighty "fraud detection algorithm", with the knobs inevitably turned towards "risk pissing off low value customers" rather than "risk letting through financial risk exposing transactions". When you want to let everyone with a hotmail account and a prepaid debit card become a "merchant", it's inevitable that there are going to be _lots_ of edge cases, and not nearly enough skilled customer service people.
If you can look critically at what you're doing, and it seems like it _might_ be an "edge case", you might want to think twice about using Paypal.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#115Yikes, 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?
You should be fine. Paypal explicitly allows the donate button for tips and things, even for non-non-profits (is that a word?).
The root issue here as far as I can tell is that regretsy is promising some kind of action (in this case buying a "mystery gift" for an unknown family) and Paypal has no way to verify that this is actually happening.
You are fine as long as you don't explicitly promise something. There's no way to claim you are running a fraudulent service if the money is out of goodwill for no purpose. There will be very few chargebacks to Paypal that claim "I gave jfruh a tip for nothing in particular, and he used it for something in particular."
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#116At the risk of being perceived as the devil's advocate, let me ask a question. I've heard of dozens of stories about Paypal along a similar vein. "They locked my account for unreasonable reason X and now are keeping the money". Most of these stories seem anecdotal. Can someone point to a rigorously documented set of cases where both Paypal and the customer's side of things are reviewed? Over the last few years, all o…
Also, have any of these people contacted paypal before using their services? I'v spent around an hour waiting for and talking with paypal support to make sure that I'm able to use paypal for my new project without any problems.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#117I've been sitting here for the last five minutes trying to make a point eloquently. I'm having a hard time with it. So I'll just put it like this: What else can we really expect from a product whose parent is eBay ? This company is a fucking fossil with all the hunger for customer satisfaction of a used tissue. Is it convenient for users? Yeah. Is it worth gambling your entire business on? Given the lack of accountab…
Neither eBay or PayPal has evolved in any meaningful way in the last decade.
PayPal has been continually extending it's international merchant support. They may look like bloodsucking imbeciles in the US, but as an Estonian I am thankful for their support as nobody else cares.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#118The donate button thing -- that's got to be because of tax reasons, right?
Reasonable question, but no. Paypal's not responsible for that, and even if they were the "it's ok to use it for a sick cat" thing is clearly not about compliance with 501c3 regulations.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#119Yikes, 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.
Bitcoin people are pretty eager to donate, because they want to support the currency. I developed a very small web site (https://cryptedmemo.com/), and have already received almost 2BTC donations. The site isn't even used that much.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#120Never before have I read an article and been greeted by the mental image of a vein bursting in my brain, the blood spewing out of my eye sockets, forming itself into an axe, and traveling through a magic portal to mutilate a company's board of directors.