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Burning man defeats PayPal

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Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#11

Post by ido »

wccrawford wrote: post #7

I hear way too many stories about this. I was even paying a company through PayPal when they had their account frozen and their money taken. 3 times. The company continued to use them because so many of their customers demanded PayPal. They had continued to use PayPal because it was cheaper to lose their funds (they regularly withdrew) than the customers. After the third time losing everything in their account, they…

What is a better alternative?

I understand Google Checkout also had similar issues in the past?

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#12

Post by [deleted] »

ido wrote: post #11
wccrawford wrote: post #7

I hear way too many stories about this. I was even paying a company through PayPal when they had their account frozen and their money taken. 3 times. The company continued to use them because so many of their customers demanded PayPal. They had continued to use PayPal because it was cheaper to lose their funds (they regularly withdrew) than the customers. After the third time losing everything in their account, they…

What is a better alternative? I understand Google Checkout also had similar issues in the past?

[deleted]

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#14

Post by patio11 »

tomh- wrote: post #5
wallflower wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I simply do not understand why there are not more competitors to PayPal If you read the excellent interview with Max Levchin in Founders at Work, he alludes to the fact that PayPal is really just a state-of-the-art, best-in-class fraud detection system with a payment frontend. He also says that Banks are more conservative than PayPal - in that they can't go after a business model where there is going to be fraud -…

He forgot to mention it has an extremely large number of false positives using that system. The reason it might work is because they take/freeze money from innocent customers. The amount of horror stories about Paypal significantly outnumber the horror stories about regular banks or credit card companies.

The amount of horror stories about Paypal significantly outnumber the horror stories about regular banks or credit card companies.

I surmise this is because you're a techy and you talk to people who run businesses online on a regular basis. If you spent a lot of time on, e.g., credit card discussion boards (they exist), or spoke to "regular people" about their payment issues on a regular basis, I suspect you would come to the opposite conclusion in a hurry.

Paypal is not a scam which achieves profitability by freezing accounts. That is crazy talk.

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#15

Post by xal »

nkassis wrote: post #4
wallflower wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I simply do not understand why there are not more competitors to PayPal If you read the excellent interview with Max Levchin in Founders at Work, he alludes to the fact that PayPal is really just a state-of-the-art, best-in-class fraud detection system with a payment frontend. He also says that Banks are more conservative than PayPal - in that they can't go after a business model where there is going to be fraud -…

Yeah that probably explain why their customer service is horrible, they see it as an afterthought. I don't have an issue with them trying to kill fraud but there needs to be better communication between Paypal and it's business customers. I wouldn't be surprised if at one point the government come in and tries to apply credit card regulation to them if thats not already the case.

Paypal has roughly 8000 employees of which 7500 work in fraud and customer services none of which is outsourced. It's not that they are not taking it seriously..

Their customer support tends to be really good in my experience, don't base too much on the one in a million horror stories that make it to this site.

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#16

Post by Throlkim »

ido wrote: post #11
wccrawford wrote: post #7

I hear way too many stories about this. I was even paying a company through PayPal when they had their account frozen and their money taken. 3 times. The company continued to use them because so many of their customers demanded PayPal. They had continued to use PayPal because it was cheaper to lose their funds (they regularly withdrew) than the customers. After the third time losing everything in their account, they…

What is a better alternative? I understand Google Checkout also had similar issues in the past?

I've yet to use it myself, and I'm not sure if it's entirely been released yet, but Amazon has a payments system in the works: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#17

Post by Ixiaus »

Burners are an innovative, sharp, and down to earth bunch; I'm not surprised PayPal got "burned" by pulling what they did. Burners are also a big(ish) community, some of which are influential people in mainstream society.

Glad to see someone met their needs, WePay just got some damn good publicity.

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#18

Post by atlantic »

patio11 wrote: post #14
tomh- wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He forgot to mention it has an extremely large number of false positives using that system. The reason it might work is because they take/freeze money from innocent customers. The amount of horror stories about Paypal significantly outnumber the horror stories about regular banks or credit card companies.

The amount of horror stories about Paypal significantly outnumber the horror stories about regular banks or credit card companies. I surmise this is because you're a techy and you talk to people who run businesses online on a regular basis. If you spent a lot of time on, e.g., credit card discussion boards (they exist), or spoke to "regular people" about their payment issues on a regular basis, I suspect you would co…

It's not crazy talk. I had a terrible experience with PayPal six months ago. I didn't believe all the horror stories and opened an account with them. They decided there was a problem and froze my account - but they neglected to tell me and continued accepting deposits, the freeze only applied to withdrawals. It was extremely difficult to recover my money.

The point is, there are no rules, there is no transparency. Their decisions are entirely arbitrary and you are at their mercy. Never again.

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#19

Post by blakejennelle »

We had a nightmare like this when we first launched MyDunkTank and were using PayPal for our payment processing. They suspended our ability to accept payments without warning or notification and then dragged us through a ridiculous and costly paperwork process for over a week.

We supplied everything they asked for and more. They denied our appeal and then locked $2,600 in our account for 180 days without explanation. We worked every channel we could to get a more reasonable outcome and it was to no avail.

There were a few good people in the PayPal bureaucracy who became champions for us but they were powerless. It was very discouraging.

The irony is that PayPal originally challenged the man. Now they are the man.

Re: Burning man defeats PayPal

#20

Post by pinksoda »

PayPal once made me refund every customer in the last 6 months. They said it was the only way to unfreeze my account. I gave them the thumbs up because I had no other options at the time, and they said, "you have to manually refund them one-by-one yourself and then call us when it is done". It was really strange.

They permanently froze my account after I refunded everyone and refused to talk to me when I called. I wasn't able to get a merchant account and I lost thousands of PayPal recurring subscriptions. This was the death of my first start-up.

PayPal is a scam and it's not as uncommon as you think. If you're using PayPal, your time will come. I didn't think they would do it to me either, they never bothered me once until all of this went down.

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