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Good riddance, PayPal

elliotjaystocks.com

161–170 of 272 posts

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#161

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 don't know if this post is legit but if it is then you must know that currently: 1. your api is by far the most hated one in the space. the only good thing about it is the sandbox. 2. there were many instances where you were greedy ( diaspora, wikileaks). Alot of stories in IM forums that you freeze money from vendors and never return the money ( to either side). 3. tens of thousands vendors are waiting for stripe…

this post is legit (see my last tweet to confirm it to citricsquid). Trust me, I know about this. And this will change. What we have in store is really good, and I know it will take time to rebuild our credo with the dev community, but we're committed, and again... you will like what you will soon see.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#162
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about PayPal, but I used to work for a well-known online retailer and have seen the fraud data on that side. The specific numbers are privileged, but suffice it to say, I'm very confident that PayPal deals with as much, if not more fraud, than the mind-boggling amounts I saw at that job.

Fraud definitely exists, but paypal should give more leeway to customers they know aren't fraud. Yes, this customer could, all of a sudden, turn into a fraudster, but there has to be a way to combat that without being so openly hostile at the beginning to a customer in good standing.

Paypal's goal is to protect the person giving the money, not the person receiving it.

Yes, that's not ideal for you as the merchant. Welcome to being a merchant. Shrinkage exists.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#163
post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but we rarely hear about how many credit card thieves PayPal's system rightful stops. (Answer: It's a lot.)". How do you know it is a lot if we rarely hear about it?

Recommended read "Founders at work". There is chapter about PayPal. I wonder if other Elon Musk's creations (SpaceX and Tesla) will become something like this after he will sell them.

Somehow I seriously doubt he will sell SpaceX especially if it's just to turn a profit. Sure in case something happens and all of sudden SpaceX as a business starts flopping, he might end up selling it to other defense and aerospace manufacturers, to at least recoup some costs for whatever shareholders.

Overall I think SpaceX is his baby. Based on interviews and what i've generally read about the man, I think he's gonna stick with it for the long run. I mean hell, he wants to go to Mars as soon as possible in one of his own rockets. That's a dedicated man.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#164
post #19
post #10

Does anyone have insider knowledge of why PayPal has been causing merchants so much trouble? It sure looks bad on the outside, but I'd be interested to hear their rationale.

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 of review time on the part of a moderately low-paid staffer at PayPal to avoid most of these PayPal Media Debacle of the Week stories.

I simply cannot believe that it's that hard to distinguish between a fraudulent user and a real one, given the presence of a significant transaction history. New accounts opened by people with no discernible history? Yes, they should freeze/ban/lock first and ask questions later. Accounts that are clearly used as part of a business? Give the customer the benefit of the doubt, or at least a 5-minute phone call.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this post is legit but if it is then you must know that currently: 1. your api is by far the most hated one in the space. the only good thing about it is the sandbox. 2. there were many instances where you were greedy ( diaspora, wikileaks). Alot of stories in IM forums that you freeze money from vendors and never return the money ( to either side). 3. tens of thousands vendors are waiting for stripe…

this post is legit (see my last tweet to confirm it to citricsquid). Trust me, I know about this. And this will change. What we have in store is really good, and I know it will take time to rebuild our credo with the dev community, but we're committed, and again... you will like what you will soon see.

David, no dev out there is waiting at home thinking "oh my gosh paypal says something good is going to happen i can't wait". This only happens only to credible service from companies that are trusted by the community. No one cares about what is going to happen in the FUTURE, we care about NOW (i have ~35k dollars a month paid by pp and i can't change paypal's generic call to action template that i know from past a/b testing will make me and you more money). paypal's gate-keeping state of mind is going to back fire hard, better believe it because it's coming.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this post is legit (see my last tweet to confirm it to citricsquid). Trust me, I know about this. And this will change. What we have in store is really good, and I know it will take time to rebuild our credo with the dev community, but we're committed, and again... you will like what you will soon see.

David, no dev out there is waiting at home thinking "oh my gosh paypal says something good is going to happen i can't wait". This only happens only to credible service from companies that are trusted by the community. No one cares about what is going to happen in the FUTURE, we care about NOW (i have ~35k dollars a month paid by pp and i can't change paypal's generic call to action template that i know from past a/b…

I agree. Want to fix your issue now. Shoot me an email david(at)paypal(dot)com, and let's figure it out.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#167
post #5
post #4

Thank you for writing this, reiterates everything i feel about Paypal as well! We use Stripe and I couldn't be happier. Started with Paypal, wanted to shoot myself on a regular basis.

Unfortunately for Elliot, myself and the countless other non-Americans in the software development world, Stripe is not available (yet) outside of the USA. Stripe have stated that they're working very hard on breaking out into other countries, but I suspect it must be an immense job, what with all of the various existing bureaucracies and regulations present in each country. Hopefully we'll get some good news in the…

http://www.braintreepayments.com/ just expanded into the EU and Canada! (Disclosure, I work for Braintree.)

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#168
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fraud definitely exists, but paypal should give more leeway to customers they know aren't fraud. Yes, this customer could, all of a sudden, turn into a fraudster, but there has to be a way to combat that without being so openly hostile at the beginning to a customer in good standing.

Paypal's goal is to protect the person giving the money, not the person receiving it. Yes, that's not ideal for you as the merchant. Welcome to being a merchant. Shrinkage exists.

Not in my case. I bought an iPod over eBay a few years back. It was delivered faulty. I chatted with seller who said send it back. I told him I would when I "got back", which I did. Sent it registered. The guy stopped answering mail when he got the device. His reputation started to plummet very quickly, mine was 100%. PayPal refused to investigate because I notified them too late (about 6 weeks after purchase) despite emails, faulty item delivered and acknowledged. PayPal is a scam and I will never trust their buyer protection again. Http://www.paypalsycks.com/

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards? If a customer doesn't have a credit card or a debit card that your payment gateway accepts, you deal with them the same way you deal with customers who don't have computers.

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.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#170
post #149
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…

> its against the TOS of Visa/MC/AMEX/etc to charge the buyer before shipment There are some FTC rules about this too, IIRC, that a product must ship within a certain period following payment. I once worked with a company where this was an issue: they had to provide a great deal of data to the FTC to plead their case.

Generally 7 days, though it depends on the card issuer.
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