deleted my PayPal when they screwed the guy who wrote Minecraft. /thread
More Paypal nonsense
151–160 of 257 posts
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#152PAYPAL: I haven’t seen that PDF. And what you’re doing is not a worthy cause, it’s charity. ME: What’s the difference? PAYPAL: You can use the donate button to raise money for a sick cat, but not poor people. Sigh. At the risk of pedantry, it's hard for my wtf filter to believe this without more context. Is this a direct quote?
Yes this is the major point of the exchange to me. It is not really for scam prevention and it has nothing to do with what is a donation or legal context. I just don't get the reason why people is not ok.
I think this one is very simple to understand: Pets don't commit fraud.
Or put differently: If somebody is running a scam here, the "pet" scenario would mean that it is you. The "poor people" scenario would mean that it is somebody else, making the whole situation a lot more complex. I think this is simply a matter of internal risk assessment triggers.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#153I'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…
> Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern? Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it . Oh if you're in the US for the US you might be able (and want) to gamble on an other younger service, but in the wider world? It's a fucking wasteland , it's either Paypal or Big Bank Merchant Account, and those are no fun at all either. My card expired (and was renewed) recently, I decided to stop using payp…
Xoom is the closest one to Paypal, the last time i checked
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
IIRC Paypal was originally designed for interpersonal payments.
Right on, Paypal was designed exactly for Bob to send Sally $10.27 for yesterday's lunch tab, according to Paypal's own promotion and vision on day one. Letting businesses, charities, and other orgs use it as a payment processor came quite a bit later.
I think it's safe to say that they, quite reasonably, figured out that the former is a risk-infested nightmare. Saying "hey, that actually cost $11, Bob!" is a minor thing in an interpersonal relationship, but when it has the potential to trigger a fraud investigation (think ex-girlfriend marking all 'casual' transactions as fraud after a breakup) you invite chaos.
So yes, they switched on that, but it's really not hard to see why. I wouldn't want to use it for personal transactions. (In Germany, we mostly use bank wire transfers for that.)
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#155No sympathy here.
Abusing "donations" on paypal to avoid paying fees and taxes is not a good business practice. Either own up to the fact that you are indeed selling something or incorporate as an actual non-profit, neither is particularly onerous.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern? Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it . Oh if you're in the US for the US you might be able (and want) to gamble on an other younger service, but in the wider world? It's a fucking wasteland , it's either Paypal or Big Bank Merchant Account, and those are no fun at all either. My card expired (and was renewed) recently, I decided to stop using payp…
I haven't seen the developer side of it, but from the consumer POV in Germany, it hardly looks like a wasteland. There are a couple of services like Moneybookers, ClickandBuy, which are very PayPal-like. There are also a few services circumventing both money "escrow" (not sure if the term is applicable) and the credit card companies by interfacing directly with your bank deposits, either directly (using your PIN/TAN,…
I haven't had a great experience with Moneybookers. I asked a question about their business account, and in response they shut down personal account without notice. They eventually changed their mind when I pointed out they'd violated their own terms of service, but it wasn't handled very well.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#157I'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?
I think it's safe to say that for most businesses, while PayPal may only get you access to 80% of potential customers, Bitcoin gets you less than 1%.
Until Bitcoin is an established process, offering it means that you have to evangelize it. That means you are suddenly in the position of trying to sell both a service and a currency to a customer. That's more risk than most merchants want to take.
I did consider using it, I have a business with a fairly technical audience, but for now, I have to wait until the legal issues (whether only perceived or actually true) are worked out.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#158At 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…
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.
Some of this is paypal's own fault. They've created the expectation that transferring money from anyone in the world to anyone else in the world should be painless and frictionless. For many cases paypal lives up to that (really quite amazing if you think about it) level of service. But the world is not a perfect place (nor is paypal of course) and a lot of people run into problems and their instinct is to blame paypal for both of those imperfections.
More so, people can use paypal without having any amount of experience with alternate payment processing methods, so they have no yard stick of comparison. They just don't know that any payment processor in the world would stomp all over them to the same or greater degree, so they merely level a harangue at paypal for not living up perfection.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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"…
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. Given that in my case, IT services were an "edge case" I would suggest that we can just shorten that to "you might want to think twice about using Paypal."
Yep, if you do anything except put things in boxes and ship them via FedEx directly to billing addresses, you're not really part of their core business.
Re: More Paypal nonsense
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe this is only true if the sales tax as purchased is less greater than or equal to the sales tax as sold, and even in that case I believe still requires a business registration and declaration of the non-taxed receipts. I am not yet, however, an expert at this stuff, and would love to be given more information to learn more about how sales tax works in these situations (I am unfortunately starting to sell phy…
There are plenty of cases where the sales tax may not apply. For example, if I replace a warranty part, I do so without collecting or remitting sales tax because the transaction had no monetary value. Assuming shipping and handling is not taxable in the jurisdiction, and assuming that the company uses all the money gained for either shipping or purchasing the toys, then even assuming it's taxable it's already covered…
Just because they don't make a profit doesn't mean they don't have to collect sales tax. When Walmart sells AA batteries as a loss leader, they don't get to not collect sales tax for it just because they used "all the money gained [(and then some, out of their own pockets!)] for either shipping or purchasing the batteries".
It gets really complex, in fact: the warranty replacement is only tax free if the warranty was a taxed line item during the original sale. If you make repairs to something, and you pass through the costs of the object to the person hiring you, you are generally considered to be a "retailer" and are responsible for collecting sales tax (which explains why you see wholesale discounts being given to large classes of professionals, from plumbers and carpenters to interior decorators).
That said, I am not claiming that the sales tax is the issue here: I'm claiming that this is a complex situation with a lot of intermingled laws and service terms, and that it is not at all clear that these people are running something that was entirely kosher and should de facto be supported.
People seem to have a thirst for PayPal's blood, and are totally ignoring (or, more favorably, simply not realizing due to lack of knowledge) that this was a somewhat sketchy, certainly risky (from a credit fraud perspective), and probably even illegal operation; and it makes no matter whether it involved feeding children or sick cats, or whether this is a computerized algorithm that flagged it or a person: the reason for the flagging, and for the blocks, actually makes a lot more sense when you examine the whole issue.