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Good riddance, PayPal

elliotjaystocks.com

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Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#171

Post by petercooper »

qeorge wrote: post #117

Anecdotal, 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…

You're supposed to authorize at time of purchase and capture only when you actually ship the goods.

I also believed this to be true, but wouldn't that mean Kickstarter (and therefore Amazon) are flagrantly violating T&Cs? I wonder if Amazon has a special arrangement with the main card issuers in this regard.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#172

Post by sitharus »

petitmiam wrote: post #169
unreal37 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://www.polipayments.com/ seems pretty good for this. 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.

Apart from the obvious problem of letting third party software have full access to your bank account.

It's a breach of my bank's terms of service, so I would be responsible for fraud if I used it. No thanks.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#173

Post by petercooper »

TomGullen wrote: post #150
davidmarcus wrote: post #148

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 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…

Your fee structure is pretty expensive as well.

Yes, but just for my part I'd certainly let them take another couple of percent (on top of the 3.9% I'm already paying with Pro) for better service :-)

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#174

Post by Silhouette »

tptacek wrote: post #78
ios84dev wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a merchant account provider have your personal social security number/be doing credit checks? Assuming its an incorporated C corp?

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.

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.

I've noticed a disturbing trend in this respect recently, with seemingly everyone from law firms to banks wanting personal guarantees from someone to back up the company. This practice should, IMHO, be prohibited by law, and this should be impossible to override via any contract.

The entire point of a limited company (in UK terms) structure is that you know you are running a legally separate entity, and everyone else knows they are dealing with a legally separate entity. Everyone should judge the risks they are willing to take and offer terms that factor in those risks accordingly. This is done to incentivise people to start new businesses where there may be some degree of risk, without having to risk literally the roof over their heads to do it, and is universally acknowledged to be in the interests of economic development, which is why every major economy in the world has a concept analogous to that limited company.

Checking the credibility of the principals and asking for things like business plans and company financial statements is all perfectly reasonable so that a potential business partner can judge the level of risk. However, allowing piercing agreements is simply a completely one-sided deal: the little guy is now back on the hook for all of the risk, yet still takes the hit on all the bureaucracy associated with running a formal company.

If such agreements were banned, the banks and lawyers and other high-powered services would still have to deal with other businesses or they'd have on customers. They'd just have to be more realistic about what they charged if they wanted to continue working with profitable customers in the long run.

[Edit: Incidentally, piercing agreements do not seem to be completely universal. We've seen some fairly unpleasantly one-sided terms while investigating payment services, frequently including things like requiring direct control of your main bank account so they can grab whatever they feel like whenever they feel like it, but not everyone has asked for personal guarantees (as opposed to a personal credit check) at least at the stage we've got to with them.]

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#175

Post by ig1 »

petercooper wrote: post #171
qeorge wrote: post #117

Anecdotal, 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…

You're supposed to authorize at time of purchase and capture only when you actually ship the goods. I also believed this to be true, but wouldn't that mean Kickstarter (and therefore Amazon) are flagrantly violating T&Cs? I wonder if Amazon has a special arrangement with the main card issuers in this regard.

Kickstarter isn't prepayment, it's patronage, the providers are under no obligation to deliver the product.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#176

Post by ig1 »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #164
patio11 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Luckily, Paypal is an anti-fraud AI company which also happens to run credit cards sometimes 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…

You're wrong. A common type of fraud on ebay is for an account to build up a reputation buying/selling low cost items (or high cost items between a group of criminal partners) before using the account to scam on high price items.

Criminals are perfectly willing to put time and effort to create fake accounts or just buy stolen accounts.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#177

Post by dennisgorelik »

mattmanser wrote: post #14
Irfaan wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If PayPal is so very terrible (and I believe it), Is there a reason Amazon Payments or Google Wallet haven't overtaken PayPal in this market? If neither Amazon nor Google's brand recognition hasn't convinced folks (buyers or sellers) to start pushing it instead of PayPal for Internet purchases, I can only hope it's because their solutions are equally terrible - otherwise, I have a hard time seeing how a new player wi…

When Google Checkout launched it was in a right mess. I remember trying to use it and it silently crashed without an error. It was bizarre, all over the forums, no Google response. It also had an even worse payment flow than paypal. Which is saying something. You can't ignore early adopters like that so no-one switched. Also seem to remember it didn't take payments from a lot of countries. Could be wrong.

Google Checkout (now Google Wallet) is still a mess both technically and with customer support.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#178

Post by dennisgorelik »

Daniel_Newby wrote: post #83
happywolf wrote: post #41

One of the reasons why PayPal so paranoid is to prevent money laundering. In fact this could be _the_ factor because any mis-step would land PP itself in big trouble and could be fined a lot of money. My guess is PP would rather err on the side of its own safety. Another cause that it will freeze an account is when it suspects the account is used for illegal activities (e.g. selling fake goods). Please note I am in n…

I doubt it. Money launderers never do chargebacks and never make complaints. They are _the_ ideal banking customer, which is why the tax man hates on them.

Money launderers launder money from stolen credit cards.

Chargebacks are filed a month or two later by owners of these stolen credit cards.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#179

Post by [deleted] »

TomGullen wrote: post #150
davidmarcus wrote: post #148

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 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…

[deleted]

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#180

Post by petercooper »

ig1 wrote: post #175
petercooper wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're supposed to authorize at time of purchase and capture only when you actually ship the goods. I also believed this to be true, but wouldn't that mean Kickstarter (and therefore Amazon) are flagrantly violating T&Cs? I wonder if Amazon has a special arrangement with the main card issuers in this regard.

Kickstarter isn't prepayment, it's patronage, the providers are under no obligation to deliver the product.

Kickstarter's T&Cs state:

Project Creators are required to fulfill all rewards of their successful fundraising campaigns or refund any Backer whose reward they do not or cannot fulfill.

http://www.kickstarter.com/terms-of-use

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