201–210 of 257 posts
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"used by the non-profit" <- I'm sorry, maybe I'm confused, but as far as I know there are no "non-profits" involved here; which entity are you speaking of here?
By non-profit, I meant an organisation/website/person looking to arrange a charitable donation and not a registered non-profit as per relevant local laws. I agree it was a bad choice of words, though.
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I haven't seen the developer side of it, but from the consumer POV in Germany, it hardly looks like a wasteland. There are a couple of services like Moneybookers, ClickandBuy, which are very PayPal-like. There are also a few services circumventing both money "escrow" (not sure if the term is applicable) and the credit card companies by interfacing directly with your bank deposits, either directly (using your PIN/TAN,…
Germany is a special country. In germany you can have direct, instant bank transfers, through internet. And that's free. No fees. So that's like paypal, but faster, more secure, cheaper also. Many use that. I know PostBank makes <1min transfers, as I used to be a customer not long ago, for example.
Even if you manage to mangle a statement like that into your offer, chances are the buyer simply transfers the money via Paypal because he did not read the text. Happend two out of two times. Made me jump out of my skin each time.
By now I hate Ebay and Paypal so much, I stopped selling my yardsale-stuff there. Will go to the next flea-market and sell there. Person to person.
Waiting for an alternative auctioning platform.
I've been sitting here for the last five minutes trying to make a point eloquently. I'm having a hard time with it. So I'll just put it like this: What else can we really expect from a product whose parent is eBay ? This company is a fucking fossil with all the hunger for customer satisfaction of a used tissue. Is it convenient for users? Yeah. Is it worth gambling your entire business on? Given the lack of accountab…
I did just that, a few days ago. If I hadn't, the Regretsy story would've done it. http://www.shdon.com/blog/2011/12/06/bye-bye-paypal-you-suck
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When PayPal terminates an account and holds the funds, they're returned after 180 days. The same as any merchant account that's terminated. It's to cover potential chargebacks, which can come in months after the fact -- though they really shouldn't do that when the only payment the frozen account received wasn't funded by a credit card.
Does anyone known if when PayPal returns the held money they also pay the legal interest? Or if they have some specific clause in their contracts that allows them not to?
Reserve accounts at any merchant account provider I've ever heard of are non-interest-bearing. It's probably a requirement of the Visa/MC Operating Regulations to de-incentivize creating them without cause.
"Donate" has a very specific meaning, at least in the US, and comes with numerous accounting connotations, including the ability to write off the expense. As many people don't realize that "charitable donations" do /not/ include "donations" to purchase toys for children, it is misleading to use the term "donation" in this circumstance. Meanwhile, often the person /accepting/ the donations doesn't understand this eith…
Out curiosity, why wouldn't PayPal just put categorical warnings on the payment page that allows merchants & buyers to assess the risk themselves? So if a merchant understands these relative risks, they can opt in to a high risk warning category, in order to make sure accounts don't become locked, and buyers can then fully understand what they're getting into via the warnings. I mean really this is all about liabilit…
The OP's story says they got "thousands of $2 payments". Let's say 3000. PayPal could, potentially, see $6000 in chargebacks, $900 in transaction fees, and $45000 ($15 * 3000) in chargeback fees assessed by the card-issuers.
If the fundraiser disappears or doesn't have a spare $45000 sitting around PayPal is on the hook for that.
They're not going to file 3000 court cases to recover it, no matter what warnings were on the site.
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Can you explain how the OP's situation is high risk?
Because the gifts given will ultimately be going to someone other than the billing address. This is really the issue in the TOS OP is coming up against, from what I can tell. Also, the actual items being sold were "mystery" gifts, not actual items. My guess is that paypal views this as high risk because someone is sending money to OP, and OP is sending "something" to someone else. It's not trackable through PayPal's…
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PayPal is not in a position to be running money for someone else's "dirty books" (which is a rather strongly negative term, but you have to realize that that is how PayPal is going to be seeing this specific pseudo-charity, and is the mental framework from which they are going to be dealing with this likely hostile person on the phone), and to the extent to which it "shouldn't concern them" (and it starts to, such as…
I don't know about you but I would never do business with a financial service provider that would essentially decide if I was running "dirty books" by your loose definition and cut off services. The problem is here you have a major problem: 1) You can't prove bad bookkeeping practices without an audit and 2) I am not consenting to an audit if that removes me from 4th Amendment search protections (meaning the auditor…
Earlier this year, Paypal notified me that they required more information about my personal account - namely confirmation that it wasn't a business in disguise. Due to my mistranslating from American English to British English, I accidentally declared that I was a charity (non-profit of course has a specific meaning), and Paypal promptly froze my personal account.
It took one phone call to the UK helpdesk, and about 20 minutes to get this fixed, and my experience with their customer support was fine. I screwed up, they were polite and helpful, no problems.
What WOULD help is if their UI translated their terms for the benefit of non-US customers (if they'd said "charity" instead of "non-profit" I'd never have chosen that option) and gave you an obvious way to say "I am not a business" (if they'd had that I wouldn't have been on that page in the first place), but I can't fault their customer support.