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PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

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Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#121

Post by yuhong »

rip747 wrote: post #4

About time, but $25M is nothing for them. Nowadays we have all our clients using Stripe for their CC processing, but back in the day, our clients could use anyone they want. One poor soul choose to use PayPal against our insisting he not. Three days before he had to give the security deposit to the convention center where his organization was hosting their conference, PayPal froze the account. I can't express the str…

I am beginning to think that probably a good comparison of PayPal would be a firewall where people report packets to be looked at manually. Braintree works differently and should not have the same problems.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#122

Post by dragonwriter »

genericuser wrote: post #119
pjc50 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, that's the normal way of running small events . There are a number of annual events that don't have a limited company organizing the thing and can't raise a 10k-100k float from those organising it; they have to operate in this manner. You have however confirmed the value of having a "sweep paypal money into an unconnected bank account ASAP" operations rule. I do wonder whether anyone's ever taken t…

If the event 'has' to operate in this manner, how will the event organizer provide refunds should something happen and they have to cancel their event? I ask because planning an event in my 2nd hand experience of weddings and such usually involves more than a few non-refundable expenses, which seem like they would prevent them from being able to provide a refund to everyone in the event of a cancellation. I mean it j…

> If the event 'has' to operate in this manner, how will the event organizer provide refunds should something happen and they have to cancel their event?

One method would be for one of the things purchased with the current payments being insurance.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#123

Post by silvestre »

madez wrote: post #99
thirdsun wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, here in Germany, maybe europe in general, you can't assume that your customers own a credit card. I like Stripe a lot, but using it as the only payment option wouldn't work for us. Credit cards have become more common here recently but for a long time it was either Paypal connected to the customers bank account or plain old bank wire transfer. Sure, there are some niche services like Sofortüberweisung, but they…

I, as a customer, actually prefer Sofortüberweisung compared to PayPal. I also don't have a credit card and I don't want to have one.

Then your giving all your online banking login data to SOFORT AG and/or Klarna AB. To me that's even worse.

I like giropay since then I'm only dealing with my own bank.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#124

Post by return0 »

arbitrage wrote: post #5

PayPal is not a bank, although people seem to think it is, and they seem to be more than happy to let people think that. It's long overdue for some serious regulatory oversight.

In Europe, paypal registered as an actual bank (in luxembourg). Incidentally, i haven't had problems with them as a merchant through the years other than the fact that they ask for too much documentation in order to accept payments more than a few thousand, and don't have enough withdrawal options sometimes. If i used a bank instead i m sure it would incur much higher fees and bureaucracy.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#125

Post by jahewson »

Moru wrote: post #26
rip747 wrote: post #4

About time, but $25M is nothing for them. Nowadays we have all our clients using Stripe for their CC processing, but back in the day, our clients could use anyone they want. One poor soul choose to use PayPal against our insisting he not. Three days before he had to give the security deposit to the convention center where his organization was hosting their conference, PayPal froze the account. I can't express the str…

I once ordered some things together with a few friends. The total sum ended up around $3500, much more than I usually buy for. The buy went through and the company got the message from Paypal that everything was ok and the money was on their account. Sadly they had a vacation day (small home-run company) and did not send the items directly. Two days later when they were back, Paypal had just pulled the money back fro…

Huh? This story doesn't really make much sense. PayPal don't charge investigation fees, don't cancel orders after two days (how would they even know to do this?) and don't allow fees to be passed on to customers ("$100 cheaper").

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#126

Post by genericuser »

dragonwriter wrote: post #122
genericuser wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the event 'has' to operate in this manner, how will the event organizer provide refunds should something happen and they have to cancel their event? I ask because planning an event in my 2nd hand experience of weddings and such usually involves more than a few non-refundable expenses, which seem like they would prevent them from being able to provide a refund to everyone in the event of a cancellation. I mean it j…

> If the event 'has' to operate in this manner, how will the event organizer provide refunds should something happen and they have to cancel their event? One method would be for one of the things purchased with the current payments being insurance.

Did not know such a thing existed, thanks. However as a minor clarification on what you said, after reading over a few descriptions by various providers it is clear however that the insurance itself would have to be purchased by the event organizer and reimbursed through the current payments, as the event insurance cost itself is not covered by event insurance. At least not in any of the lists of nonrefundable reimbursements I am looking at, so it would represent a small amount of money risked by event organizer.

So as long as an event organizer has bought event insurance already, and proves that to Paypal, then yes they should release the money.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#127

Post by logicallee »

ohitsdom wrote: post #79
seiji wrote: post #10

Related: why doesn't anybody take down LinkedIn? They run consistently obviously illegal spam/marketing practices. Why do they get a free pass? Is the "mafia" part of PayPal mafia too strong? Too many cross-bred investor attachments all the way down making some services "untouchable" no matter what they do? We need something like the EFF but for out of control tech companies needing to be denounced for the public goo…

I'm missing the LinkedIn comparison. PayPal handles money. Their track record of horrible customer service has caused a lot of financial trouble for people and institutions. What are the complaints with LinkedIn? As far as I know, it's more of spammy contacting behavior. Which I get that's annoying, but not even in the same ballpark as PayPal.

The claim I heard is (from the perspective of the complaint), that they "use your gmail account [with your nominal permission] and get the names of your contacts, to whom they then 'impersonate' you." (scare quotes because I don't view it this way.) i.e. your contacts will get a message "from you" as though you were asking them to do something. Even though you have not actually taken that action.

Personally this is not my perspective, and it doesn't bother me because when I receive these messages it's pretty obviously automated mail from linkedin, and it's pretty obvious that LinkedIn got it from the person's email contacts. It doesn't cause me to think the person actually necessarily took any action or sent that to me themselves. I also haven't been bothered by the volume of it. To me, it's the kind of thing that's a small price to pay for hacking a network of connections together, which is probably a benefit to everyone in it. we need more social networks, not fewer.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#128

Post by sblawrie »

heyalexej wrote: post #105
sblawrie wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if you just need a page (the page can be external to your own site) that accepts payment and emails you a receipt, and you don't want to write any server-side code? Can Stripe do that the way PayPal can?

Absolutely. And it's incredibly simple, too: https://stripe.com/checkout Alternatively you have always solutions like https://gumroad.com/ or https://simplegoods.co/ of which you can see a real world implementation here: http://foundersgrid.com/sponsor (No affiliation with any of these, just found it the other day.)

But all of these just hand you back a token which you then have to pass to your server for actually processing the charge. What if you don't want to set up any server-side code? Or am I missing something...

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#129

Post by jotm »

1_player wrote: post #19
coffeedrinker wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal has some serious issues with regards to what you say, but I used it last summer to transfer money from USA to Europe for my daughter and the fee was a fraction of what the bank wanted. Banks can be pretty scummy in their own way.

Have you ever tried TransferWise? With customers and family around the world, I'm thinking of switching to them to handle transfers instead of Paypal/Stripe. They seem to have the most honest fees around. Disclaimer: not affiliated with them. Just genuinely curious.

How does it work? I wanted to use them once, but it was the first time I heard about them and their site doesn't explain anything.

If anything, it looks shady - "outsmart your bank, use us, we do it super cheap, promise!" but no explanation of how it actually works...

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#130

Post by jotm »

vezycash wrote: post #110
1_player wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you ever tried TransferWise? With customers and family around the world, I'm thinking of switching to them to handle transfers instead of Paypal/Stripe. They seem to have the most honest fees around. Disclaimer: not affiliated with them. Just genuinely curious.

About TransferWise. I checked their site based on your recommendation. However, something bothers me. There's a form on the Top-right corner. "You send," "You Receive." I tried checking how much would be received in dollars if I sent $1000. However, the form wouldn't let me. It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency. It felt shady to me. I've sent this message to them already. But wow! They do support a l…

Heh, I said the same thing - their explanations and their site needs a bit of rework. As it is, they look shady :-)
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