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Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

pydanny.com

21–30 of 51 posts

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#21
post #4

Maybe there's a business idea in payment processing for events.

Like EventBrite? http://www.eventbrite.com/

Eventbrite doesn't pay out until 5 days after the event, but at least they announce that up front and don't tend to randomly freeze accounts and hold on to your money indefinitely.

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#23
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial for the community managers and developer evangelists of PayPal to check on conferences. And it's trivial for anti-fraud people at PayPal check on conferences vetted by the community managers and developer evangelists. If PayPal wants to continue angering the community and world with this blanket policy, that's their problem. We'll all move on to other payment systems as they emerge.

The problem is that you haven't identified PayPal's concern. It's not sussing out whether a conference is real or fake. All of the money is at risk even in a real conference, run by a trustworthy person. You want their evangelists to reach out to conference organizers. If they were intimately involved in every single developer conference worldwide, it still would not eliminate PayPal's risk. It wouldn't solve the pro…

It's worse than that. What happens when the event organizer, operating 100% in good faith, buys equipment, pays for airfare and lodging for special guests and event staff, pays deposits for the space, etc. and then due to events outside of their control the event has to be cancelled (perhaps due to a hurricane or maybe the bass player in the band decides to go into rehab and the concert gets cancelled, which happened to me once and they refunded me all but $5 of the ticket price back)? Now the event organizer doesn't have enough money to pay everyone back. This is part of the reason why "service charges" and "convenience fees" are so high when you buy tickets in advance, because it can rapidly turn into a giant cluster fuck.

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#24
post #15
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a conference issue: https://www.paypal-businesscenter.com/content/presale-policy...

It's trivial for the community managers and developer evangelists of PayPal to check on conferences. And it's trivial for anti-fraud people at PayPal check on conferences vetted by the community managers and developer evangelists. If PayPal wants to continue angering the community and world with this blanket policy, that's their problem. We'll all move on to other payment systems as they emerge.

Saying it is trivial shows how little you have thought about the issues involved. Anything checks that are trivial mean it is easy to be scammed.

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#25

Wow, I find it amazing that there is so much augery going on in this post. Ooo, maybe paypal hates python conferences! Maybe they just hate open source conferences! And then they go on to describe how they refuse to kowtow to the obviously made up "needs of paypal's anti-fraud division". There are lots of reasons to get mad at paypal but all too often the formula "We understood nothing about business, didn't even bot…

Agreed. I organized a startup conference (http://thestartupconference.com) for 3 years in 4 cities, always with PayPal as payment. Some advice: make sure you are incorporated. Definitely don't use a personal account to receive payments. Assume that most of the money may be stuck for a while, but know that you'll get your payments eventually, so arrange for backup financing.

Bottom line: if you do this as an amateur, expect to be treated like one. You can't script banking like you'd script ssh.

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#26
post #16
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right, it's more than just conferences. But conferences and the will of the developer community are a critical factor in PayPal's ongoing success. Stripe and it's competitors are making inroads because of PayPal's difficulty of use AND their forbidding anti-fraud policies. As for proper merchant account providers, tell that to people in countries where the majority of residents can get PayPal but not credit ca…

I understand that. We're in the same boat. We have to use PayPal because it's what our customers want. But it's up to the business / organizer to minimize the risk, same as it's PayPal's job to minimize theirs. Could split processing between merchants, attempt to get authorization for capturing at a later date, etc. Great book by the way, just picked it up yesterday.

Glad you liked the book!

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#27
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's trivial for the community managers and developer evangelists of PayPal to check on conferences. And it's trivial for anti-fraud people at PayPal check on conferences vetted by the community managers and developer evangelists. If PayPal wants to continue angering the community and world with this blanket policy, that's their problem. We'll all move on to other payment systems as they emerge.

Saying it is trivial shows how little you have thought about the issues involved. Anything checks that are trivial mean it is easy to be scammed.

Heroku does it with 7-8, maybe ten people for all events around the world. So do other companies like 10gen. Why not PayPal's developer community staff? What's their problem?

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#28
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it is trivial shows how little you have thought about the issues involved. Anything checks that are trivial mean it is easy to be scammed.

Heroku does it with 7-8, maybe ten people for all events around the world. So do other companies like 10gen. Why not PayPal's developer community staff? What's their problem?

[deleted]

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it is trivial shows how little you have thought about the issues involved. Anything checks that are trivial mean it is easy to be scammed.

Heroku does it with 7-8, maybe ten people for all events around the world. So do other companies like 10gen. Why not PayPal's developer community staff? What's their problem?

I'm absolutely shocked by your level of naivety. Why do you imagine that Heroku and Paypal are even remotely comparable companies? Do you have any conception of the total volume of transactions that paypal processes? It's millions of transactions and hundreds of millions of dollars per day. That's about 3 to 4 orders of magnitude larger than heroku's business.

Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal

#30
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it is trivial shows how little you have thought about the issues involved. Anything checks that are trivial mean it is easy to be scammed.

Heroku does it with 7-8, maybe ten people for all events around the world. So do other companies like 10gen. Why not PayPal's developer community staff? What's their problem?

[deleted]
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