Maybe there's a business idea in payment processing for events.
Like EventBrite? http://www.eventbrite.com/
Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
11–20 of 51 posts
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#12All PayPal would need to do is contact by email 50 of the people who already paid and ask if the are confident the event is legit.
Since they don't, it shows they are a criminal organization.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#13How is this related to just conferences? PayPal doesn't have an anti-conference agenda.. There seems to be two things that set PayPal off. 1) Small volume to huge volume in a matter of days. 2) Taking payments for something happening in the future. Story after story about both of these scenarios. It seems obvious at this point that PayPal is not a good processor for things like pre-sales or events. It may be annoying…
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 cards.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#14Wow, 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…
How hard is it for PayPal to pay 10 people as community managers or developer evangelists to take care of this issue? Heck, smaller companies like Heroku do it with about 8 people and cover the globe. Answer: They've already done it. They have the staff in place. The problem is their community managers and developer evangelists are sticking to PayPal specific conferences. They aren't in touch with people like me and…
It's not a conference issue:
https://www.paypal-businesscenter.com/content/presale-policy...
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
How hard is it for PayPal to pay 10 people as community managers or developer evangelists to take care of this issue? Heck, smaller companies like Heroku do it with about 8 people and cover the globe. Answer: They've already done it. They have the staff in place. The problem is their community managers and developer evangelists are sticking to PayPal specific conferences. They aren't in touch with people like me and…
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.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#16How is this related to just conferences? PayPal doesn't have an anti-conference agenda.. There seems to be two things that set PayPal off. 1) Small volume to huge volume in a matter of days. 2) Taking payments for something happening in the future. Story after story about both of these scenarios. It seems obvious at this point that PayPal is not a good processor for things like pre-sales or events. It may be annoying…
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.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#17I've seen this problem come up multiple times, and had to talk to my bank when I got hit by it myself, but I absolutely understand why it happens. In our case it was because we moved from taking registration fees to taking accommodation deposits as well, and suddenly a large amount of money appeared in our account, and it does look very odd.
What I'd be interested in seeing would be somebody like eventbrite handling accommodation deposits and so forth as well as registration, then I could funnel everything through that. It's important that any such service release the funds to the event early so they can actually be used for running the event.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#18Earlier 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.
This isn't about just ensuring that a conference is legitimate or not, it's a fundamental problem with presale events. You'll have the same issue if you have an ordinary merchant account as well, presales are a huge liability concern, especially for events, legitimate or no.
If you find yourself in circumstances where you require presale revenue in order to hold an event then I'd suggest using a crowdfunding platform like kicktarter or indiegogo or the specifically event oriented event tilt and picatic.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#19I can't help but mention Bitcoin here. For international things like open source events, it would work just perfectly. Especially given the tech audience that is attracted to these, Bitcoin might be the easiest way to pay for opensource conferences.
They'll figure it out someday. Give them time.
Re: Open Source Events Get Burned By PayPal
#20Earlier 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.
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 problem.
The risk is that one single person holds a huge pile of funds for services that are supposed to be rendered in the future. That single person can skip out of town at any time. They could get hit by a bus. Their venue could burn down in a fire. Whatever the cause, there is a non-zero risk that the funds aren't used as intended or the event doesn't happen, and PayPal will be on the hook for hundreds or thousands of disputes and chargebacks from the purchasers.
This is why payment services for events like EventBrite don't work like PayPal. EB gets paid the money, and the event organizer has no access to it until after the event, when there's no chance of EB being on the hook for disputes for an event that didn't happen.
PayPal isn't in the insurance business. When it does allow a pre-sale, per the terms already linked in this discussion, they typically require a reserve. That means money can come into your account but you can't withdraw it. That's not malicious, that's the same thing EventBrite does. You only get the money after you've rendered the service it was paid for; it's protection for the attendees and PayPal. To expect anything different is to expect PayPal to act as a free insurer of events.