Good riddance, PayPal

No, I haven't currently implemented Stripe. It's another payment processor, the kind that provides their own payment page.

Both physical goods, cash and bitcoins once transferred are hard to get back. But this does not invalidate property rights and prevention of fraud. If two parties cannot resolve a conflict by themselves, they turn to a third party. This has nothing to do with bitcoins, paypal or any money system.

Bitcoin is valuable because it gives you a choice: you can either have third party to resolve issues and insure risks, or you can go by yourself. In case of paypal/visa/wire transfer you do not have such choice.

From a customer's, it means you have precisely zero assurance once you've paid that the other guy will follow through. It's just like sending cash through the mail, except with no chance it won't get there.

Hey, everyone — I'm David Marcus, and I've been running PayPal for the past 5 months. Hard for me not to comment on this thread. PayPal brought a lot of goodness to millions of merchants, and hundreds of millions of users around the world. But yes... as the company grew exponentially we were met with growing pains. And developers, merchants, and consumers sometimes had to pay the price for it. I still want to stress that when you manage money at such a scale, you always attract bad people with wrong intentions. Our intention has always been to protect our customers. Not to mess around with our merchants.

I want to share two things with all of you:

#1 — there's a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.

#2 — you have my commitment to make this company GREAT again. We're reinventing how we work, our products, our platforms, our APIs, and our policies. This WILL change, and we won't rest until you all see it. The first installments are due very soon. So stay tuned...

I have to say I do like the new business phone number which every time seems to connect me to a friendly and helpful person each time.

That's where the positives end for me however. For Paypal, I fear it's too little too late. You've done too much damage to yourselves. I get the reasons why you do things, but the communication over the last years has been atrocious.

We're in the UK and are just waiting for Stripe to come over. I think a lot of other businesses are thinking along the same lines as well.

Your fee structure is pretty expensive as well. There's also a lot of hidden costs:

- We're on an upper tier so should have a reduced commission rate. However, after scratching my head for ages as to why a majority of our sales are not at the lowered rate I finally find the link about cross border fees or whatever reason you use to charge us more. As an example, some of our $119 USD sales have $4.35 fees which is ~3.7%. Our current rate it says on our account should be 1.9%. Your fees structure is not as clear as it should be.

- Have you tried issuing a refund in a different currency? You have to draw money from your bank (even if there are available funds), which is converted to the correct currency which because your spreads as so expensive means sometimes refunds cost us money. I phoned up about this and they told me to open different currency balances which I did and which fixed the issue, but again, bad communication and a broken process

- Related to the previous point, your spreads on foreign conversions are high. I think they've improved a bit over the last couple of years but I still consider them an expensive hidden cost. I contacted Stripe asking what spreads they offer, and they told me they would consider it a hidden cost and they offer customers the same spreads the banks give them.

Also, your website is mind bogglingly slow. See this support ticket I opened: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Access-and-security/Why-...

The support person didn't do anything about it. I didn't expect them to though, as Paypal is an impenetrable behemoth that doesn't seem to care about these sorts of things.

Your website being as slow as it is, mind numbingly slow, is honestly enough reason alone for me to move service. Trying to find transactions just is a huge waste of my time waiting for each page to load. Try using your sandbox with pages that load that slow.

> there's a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.

So can you make your website faster for a start?