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…
I don't know if this post is legit but if it is then you must know that currently: 1. your api is by far the most hated one in the space. the only good thing about it is the sandbox. 2. there were many instances where you were greedy ( diaspora, wikileaks). Alot of stories in IM forums that you freeze money from vendors and never return the money ( to either side). 3. tens of thousands vendors are waiting for stripe…
Good riddance, PayPal
161–170 of 272 posts
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Fraud definitely exists, but paypal should give more leeway to customers they know aren't fraud. Yes, this customer could, all of a sudden, turn into a fraudster, but there has to be a way to combat that without being so openly hostile at the beginning to a customer in good standing.
Yes, that's not ideal for you as the merchant. Welcome to being a merchant. Shrinkage exists.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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?
Recommended read "Founders at work". There is chapter about PayPal. I wonder if other Elon Musk's creations (SpaceX and Tesla) will become something like this after he will sell them.
Overall I think SpaceX is his baby. Based on interviews and what i've generally read about the man, I think he's gonna stick with it for the long run. I mean hell, he wants to go to Mars as soon as possible in one of his own rockets. That's a dedicated man.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#164Does anyone have insider knowledge of why PayPal has been causing merchants so much trouble? It sure looks bad on the outside, but I'd be interested to hear their rationale.
To the extent this perception represents actual reality: You know how every time a new payment provider comes up and people kvelch that it isn't available in their country and how no provider is? This is because every payment provider which attempts to hit as many countries as Paypal does dies . They're killed by fraud. (Fraud kills domestic ones, too, all the time, but it's marginally less frequent.) Luckily, Paypal…
The thing is, it shouldn't take much in the way of "AI" to recognize that a company that has already been doing business for several months or even years is probably not going to wake up one morning and start defrauding people. Criminals are lazy, and running a business is a lot of work. It would take about 30 seconds' worth of review time on the part of a moderately low-paid staffer at PayPal to avoid most of these PayPal Media Debacle of the Week stories.
I simply cannot believe that it's that hard to distinguish between a fraudulent user and a real one, given the presence of a significant transaction history. New accounts opened by people with no discernible history? Yes, they should freeze/ban/lock first and ask questions later. Accounts that are clearly used as part of a business? Give the customer the benefit of the doubt, or at least a 5-minute phone call.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know if this post is legit but if it is then you must know that currently: 1. your api is by far the most hated one in the space. the only good thing about it is the sandbox. 2. there were many instances where you were greedy ( diaspora, wikileaks). Alot of stories in IM forums that you freeze money from vendors and never return the money ( to either side). 3. tens of thousands vendors are waiting for stripe…
this post is legit (see my last tweet to confirm it to citricsquid). Trust me, I know about this. And this will change. What we have in store is really good, and I know it will take time to rebuild our credo with the dev community, but we're committed, and again... you will like what you will soon see.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
this post is legit (see my last tweet to confirm it to citricsquid). Trust me, I know about this. And this will change. What we have in store is really good, and I know it will take time to rebuild our credo with the dev community, but we're committed, and again... you will like what you will soon see.
David, no dev out there is waiting at home thinking "oh my gosh paypal says something good is going to happen i can't wait". This only happens only to credible service from companies that are trusted by the community. No one cares about what is going to happen in the FUTURE, we care about NOW (i have ~35k dollars a month paid by pp and i can't change paypal's generic call to action template that i know from past a/b…
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#167Thank you for writing this, reiterates everything i feel about Paypal as well! We use Stripe and I couldn't be happier. Started with Paypal, wanted to shoot myself on a regular basis.
Unfortunately for Elliot, myself and the countless other non-Americans in the software development world, Stripe is not available (yet) outside of the USA. Stripe have stated that they're working very hard on breaking out into other countries, but I suspect it must be an immense job, what with all of the various existing bureaucracies and regulations present in each country. Hopefully we'll get some good news in the…
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fraud definitely exists, but paypal should give more leeway to customers they know aren't fraud. Yes, this customer could, all of a sudden, turn into a fraudster, but there has to be a way to combat that without being so openly hostile at the beginning to a customer in good standing.
Paypal's goal is to protect the person giving the money, not the person receiving it. Yes, that's not ideal for you as the merchant. Welcome to being a merchant. Shrinkage exists.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
When you go to make a payment, it logs into your bank account and does the transfer for you. So you get an instant receipt, without having to wait for the money to show up in the merchants bank account.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#170Anecdotal, 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 t…
> its against the TOS of Visa/MC/AMEX/etc to charge the buyer before shipment There are some FTC rules about this too, IIRC, that a product must ship within a certain period following payment. I once worked with a company where this was an issue: they had to provide a great deal of data to the FTC to plead their case.