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More Paypal nonsense

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Re: More Paypal nonsense

#221

Post by luser001 »

jacques_chester wrote: post #132
etheric wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it. Off the top of my head, https://payments.amazon.com/ is a great alternative. Not sure how the rates stack up, but I definitely trust Amazon more than I trust PayPal. I'm sure there are more alternatives available, I don't know why so many people insist on using PayPal. I think Amazon allows donations cause kickstarter.com uses it, and you don't necessarily g…

You didn't read closely. Inside the US there are lots of alternatives. Outside the US it is, as the fellow said, a wasteland. Take Amazon payments, for example: "Q: What countries and currencies are supported by Amazon FPS? Amazon FPS allows U.S. as well as international customers to use major credit cards to make payments on Amazon FPS-powered websites. ... All transactions are in U.S. dollars. " Emphasis mine, beca…

that renders Amazon worthless? That seems a little harsh. Can't you just list your prices in USD?

I know people in India who order books from Amazon US and pay in USD using their India-issued credit card.

I think it's just a matter of UX to show the price in USD to a foreign audience.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#222

Post by Lagged2Death »

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.

Well it was at least originally marketed as being for interpersonal payments, as a service that John Q. Public would want an account on for that purpose.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#223

Post by joshuap »

Someone should start an anti-paypal campaign that recreates the paypal buttons, except they have a big red X through them, and link to a collected list of grievances. I'd put one on my site... I dealt with all this garbage in 2004 and haven't used them as a seller since.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#224

Post by runako »

wdewind wrote: post #17
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?

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…

>> I do feel for people who legitimately have their accounts wrongly frozen (I am one of them, though mine was unfrozen after a few days)

This is the heart of the issue. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is little to no transparency in the freezing/unfreezing of accounts. This makes PayPal a cash flow risk to any business that relies on it for funding. I wouldn't be comfortable if my employees' pay depended on cash flow coming in from PayPal unless I had other dependable sources of emergency cash flow that could be tapped for indefinite periods of time.

It's good that your account was unfrozen after a few days, but what if you needed the money to pay your employees, so that they could pay their rents? Getting lucky with a short freeze is not a business strategy.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#225

Post by Tangurena »

Paypal wants to be a bank without being regulated as a bank. If they were regulated, this sort of fiasco would get their charter revoked.

In addition, the business courses I'm taking all (in the text books and case studies used in classes) point to how eBay is trying to transition away from the auction model and turn into fix-price sales as some sort of discount Amazon Marketplace. Making life miserable for smaller retailers and auctioners is part of this goal.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#227

Post by haakon »

jerguismi wrote: post #119
8plot wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Almost 6 USD worth of donations, whoa. :-)

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#228

Post by knightgj »

saurik wrote: post #67
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.

What are you selling?

i just use my account for personal use. selling used things via forums/ebay/cl.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#229

Post by ubernostrum »

dangrossman wrote: post #20
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?

> These horror stories are so common Don't take that for granted. PayPal has 232 million registered accounts, and many more unregistered buyers. Even if 99.99% of PayPal account holders were completely satisfied and never had any problem, that'd 0.01% would still be 23200 pissed off people. Is it right to wonder "does anyone still use PayPal" if 99.99% of PayPal users have no problem using the service?

The problem with PayPal, and the reason why these horror stories exist at all, is simple: the entirety of PayPal's dispute-resolution system seems to consist of "the system flagged it, tough luck". And the only way to get actual service from PayPal past that point is to raise a massive cry of bad PR for them online.

So, yeah: if they don't want to deal with their customers, we can fix that by encouraging a situation in which they have no customers to deal with.

Re: More Paypal nonsense

#230

Post by wdewind »

runako wrote: post #224
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…

>> I do feel for people who legitimately have their accounts wrongly frozen (I am one of them, though mine was unfrozen after a few days) This is the heart of the issue. Based on anecdotal evidence, there is little to no transparency in the freezing/unfreezing of accounts. This makes PayPal a cash flow risk to any business that relies on it for funding. I wouldn't be comfortable if my employees' pay depended on cash…

It's not that you are wrong, it's that this risk exists in every payment processor. Paypal anecdotally looks worse because it gets MUCH more press than other payment processors. A service that handles this better is a unicorn.
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