Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's absolutely hilarious! They should have just stuck with their original brand, which wasn't all that terrible either!
Can't we agree that both names are equally horrible?
Yes!
Good riddance, PayPal
111–120 of 272 posts
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can extrapolate based on two things. Firstly the would-be competitors who have been utterly murdered by various kinds of fraud. Secondly the assumption that the amount of fraud in the world isn't going down. There are people (individuals, and entire enterprises) dedicated to financial shenanigans of the black hat variety. If Paypal didn't have a robust risk prevention system, they'd have been annihilated a long t…
Can you name some of those competitors destroyed by fraud? I'd be interested to learn more about those cases.
If I recall correctly there is a mention of this on Paypal's story in Founders at Work.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
I use Paypal for one reason (as the consumer); it adds an extra layer of protection for me. I don't want to give my CC details to every site I buy from. And then have to check my CC statement everyday to make sure nothing was hacked along the way. For a consumer, Paypal makes it very easy to manage payments, receipts, and any other issues. By the way, never ever use a debt card online. You're handing over access to y…
> By the way, never ever use a debt card online. You're handing over access to your bank account. Are you sure about that? Visa will refund you money if your card is lost or stolen: http://usa.visa.com/personal/cards/debit/visa_check_cards_fa... My personal bank also has similar verbiage for my debit card. They also mention that internet purchases are considered non-PIN purchases and are offered the same protection.…
I repeat this almost every time this topic comes up:
With a credit card, you can say that the charge was fraudulent and they will take the charge(s) off and you're not on the hook. With a debit card, you're out the money of the fraudulent charge while the bank investigates. From my personal experience, this can take a few days to 3 weeks before the bank puts the money back in your account. If the charge happens to put your account into overdraft, you may still have to pay the overdraft fee which may be hard to get overturned.
I pretty much only use my debit card as an ATM card. Very rarely do I actually use it as a debit card (there are rare instances where I may need to)
Conclusion: Don't use your debit card online if you have a credit card.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
One can extrapolate based on two things. Firstly the would-be competitors who have been utterly murdered by various kinds of fraud. Secondly the assumption that the amount of fraud in the world isn't going down. There are people (individuals, and entire enterprises) dedicated to financial shenanigans of the black hat variety. If Paypal didn't have a robust risk prevention system, they'd have been annihilated a long t…
Can you name some of those competitors destroyed by fraud? I'd be interested to learn more about those cases.
I've been using PayPal plus another payment provider to provide other payment options and I can say that I get almost no chargebacks with PayPal. I think I've had one in the past year. The other company, I get several chargebacks a month. Their fraud protections just aren't nearly as good as PayPal.
In fact, I often spot fraudulent charges very quickly and have to email my third part processor to refund or cancel the payments.
I was pointed to http://maxmind.com by another HN poster, which is an API that'll give you a probability of a charge being fraudulent so you can verify it before passing it to the payment provider. I'm going to test that out in combination with Stripe.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because merchant banks require them. Anyone can create any number of C corporations at any time. Merchant accounts are one of several business services that young companies can't set typically set up without somehow binding the contract to the business owners themselves.
> one of several business services Could elaborate on the other ones?
Depending on the market, leases are another example.
If you think about this for just a second, you can see that incorporation can't possibly be a "get out of credit checks free" card.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#116"PayPal have all the power of a bank and yet none of the responsibility." That is precisely the problem, PayPal is on the hook for any credit card charges for 6 months so they are much more willing to protect themselves then to try to understand a specific situation. They are a black box when it comes to these types of issues, you feed lots of information in but you get almost nothing in return. Banks usually transfe…
No, its not. PayPal is a bank in the European Union.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#117Anecdotal, but maybe helpful: we had a customer purchase software from us almost a year ago, who paid via PayPal but using their Visa. They've now initiated a chargeback. When that occurs, Visa takes the money from PayPal, who takes it from us, immediately - Visa presumes their customer is "innocent" if you will.
It makes no sense, but if you don't like it your option is to not accept Visa. They own the customer so they make the rules. It doesn't matter if its PayPal, Stripe, or any other merchant - if your buyer initiates a chargeback, you'll lose the money until its resolved (~6 months, usually).
As such, PayPal/Stripe/any other merchant account will hold your money for a period of time, until they are comfortable that either:
1) its been long enough that a chargeback is unlikely
2) they'll be able to get the money back from you if a chargeback occurs later.
Also relevant to this specific case: its against the TOS of Visa/MC/AMEX/etc to charge the buyer before shipment. You're supposed to authorize at time of purchase and capture only when you actually ship the goods. The OP seems to blatantly violate this, and I suspect they'll have to change the practice regardless of their choice of merchant account.
None of this excuses PayPal's lack of customer support. But Stripe et. all may not be the panacea you're hoping for. Credit cards are where these crazy policies originate, and unless you're prepared to stop accepting them, you'll have to play ball.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#118Perhaps someone who runs their own company can answer this question for me: If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards? Are your customers exclusively in North America? Or do you just write those customers off (which is a valid option if PayPal integration would be that painful)? Adding PayPal as a payment option has been an enormous pain for us but a non-consequent…
If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards? If a customer doesn't have a credit card or a debit card that your payment gateway accepts, you deal with them the same way you deal with customers who don't have computers.
My girlfriend's online business accepts bank transfers if customers can't pay online. "Go to this bank and deposit $X to account Y".
Maybe it doesn't scale too well, but at her business scale it still works for the exception cases and money is money. If you're biggest problem is too many people depositing money to your bank account, that's not a bad problem.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#119PayPal do themselves no favours by not coming forward with explanations similar to those that see in this thread. Their deafening silence plus the bullshit automated responses are what appear to be driving customers away in droves.
I certainly wouldn't set up any of my businesses to rely on PayPal to take payments, and I expect many others feel the same way.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Excellent points. As developers, we're used to just plugging in an API and have it "just work". Money transfer systems are different. They draw a lot of dark, evil forces that try not just to hack their systems, but to game and abuse it through normal operations. It's unfortunate that legitimate businesses get caught in the crossfire sometimes, but we rarely hear about how many credit card thieves PayPal's system rig…
"but we rarely hear about how many credit card thieves PayPal's system rightful stops. (Answer: It's a lot.)". How do you know it is a lot if we rarely hear about it?
I don't know about PayPal, but I used to work for a well-known online retailer and have seen the fraud data on that side.
The specific numbers are privileged, but suffice it to say, I'm very confident that PayPal deals with as much, if not more fraud, than the mind-boggling amounts I saw at that job.