Any good alternatives?
Braintree: https://www.braintreepayments.com/tour/international
(Disclosure: I work at Braintree)
Good riddance, PayPal
51–60 of 272 posts
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#52Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#53Perhaps someone who runs their own company can answer this question for me: If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards? Are your customers exclusively in North America? Or do you just write those customers off (which is a valid option if PayPal integration would be that painful)? Adding PayPal as a payment option has been an enormous pain for us but a non-consequent…
There are debit cards out there! In fact, everyone I know has at least one debit card (either MasterCard or VISA), aside from the number of people who have an AMEX/VISA (credit type). And debit cards work everywhere. I've used my VISA Electron (debit) pretty much everywhere in the developed world, both online and travelling abroad.
I use Paypal for one reason (as the consumer); it adds an extra layer of protection for me. I don't want to give my CC details to every site I buy from. And then have to check my CC statement everyday to make sure nothing was hacked along the way.
For a consumer, Paypal makes it very easy to manage payments, receipts, and any other issues.
By the way, never ever use a debt card online. You're handing over access to your bank account.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#54Paypal to me is the classical example of the incumbent growing stale and detached from its consumer base on which it built its business on. Sellers like Eliot are the bulk of Paypal's business - small businesses who needed a (relatively) easy way to start accepting payments online. Paypal is just giving every opportunity for someone else to come and get their market share. Hopefully it will happen sooner rather than…
If PayPal is so very terrible (and I believe it), Is there a reason Amazon Payments or Google Wallet haven't overtaken PayPal in this market? If neither Amazon nor Google's brand recognition hasn't convinced folks (buyers or sellers) to start pushing it instead of PayPal for Internet purchases, I can only hope it's because their solutions are equally terrible - otherwise, I have a hard time seeing how a new player wi…
>Is there a reason Amazon Payments or Google Wallet haven't overtaken PayPal in this market?
Network effects, name recognition, and forced integration with the only online auction site that matters.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#55This is why Bitcoins was created.
No it isn't. Bitcoin's killer feature is anonymity. It has no underwriting, no risk prevention, and worst of all, no ubiquity.
Once you pay someone with BTC, your money is gone. It's that simple. Unless you involve a third party of some kind, and then it's PayPal all over again... though I assume it's a great deal easier to become a BTC middleman than a middleman of any established currency, due to lack of idiotic government red tape to jump through.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#56I fully understand Paypal's need to protect itself from scammers. I get it. The loss potential is huge.
I think the problem here is that they really don't have any kind of a real relationship with their customers.
As an honest business person --not a scammer-- when this kind of thing happens to you it is horribly disruptive and demoralizing. As honest people we should be spending time on our business rather than trying to get our money out of a company that has totalitarian control over it. It could, and has, sink a business.
That said, I feel the OP may have triggered the freeze by clearing the account of nearly all funds a couple of days after the phone interview. If I were looking at that data I would see it as a potential red flag. It would almost be irresponsible not to interpret it that way.
I've had sales in excess of $20K (meaning, the invoice for that particular purchase was $20K) come into one of our Paypal accounts and have never had any issues. Then again, the money tends to stay in the account for months. I don't think they've ever seen us clear large amounts of money out of the account immediately after a large sale. That, I am sure, builds trust, even at the algorithmic level.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#57Any good alternatives?
I don't know how well it would work for commercial things, but for personal payments between people you know, Venmo is awesome. https://venmo.com/ (Still U.S. only though.)
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#58The customer service angle sucks, no question, and I'm worried about getting into similar trouble (I sell downloadable games via PayPal). But I actually think holding an issues worth of revenue in reserve is a decent enough compromise. If the company goes bankrupt before an issue ships, for whatever reason, PayPal themselves are going to be on the hook for refunding every single payment, as well as chargeback fees th…
> PayPal's freeze on that money means their end is covered, and you can still bring the sales to a bank and get a line of credit to cover the printing costs
So your suggested way around this is to incur credit charges & pay for the credit risk baked into the interest rate all so that Paypal is covered?
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#59Perhaps someone who runs their own company can answer this question for me: If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from customers who don't have credit cards? Are your customers exclusively in North America? Or do you just write those customers off (which is a valid option if PayPal integration would be that painful)? Adding PayPal as a payment option has been an enormous pain for us but a non-consequent…
There are debit cards out there! In fact, everyone I know has at least one debit card (either MasterCard or VISA), aside from the number of people who have an AMEX/VISA (credit type). And debit cards work everywhere. I've used my VISA Electron (debit) pretty much everywhere in the developed world, both online and travelling abroad.
While Mastercard/Visa debit cards are common in many countries (they certainly are in the UK, for example), there are places they're unheard of. New Zealand bank cards, for example, are typically not those kinds of debit cards and can't be easily used over the internet. They are almost universally accepted in NZ though, rather more so than debit cards in the UK where it's not that uncommon to find pubs or cafes that have a minimum charge or, in rare cases, don't take them.
Re: Good riddance, PayPal
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are debit cards out there! In fact, everyone I know has at least one debit card (either MasterCard or VISA), aside from the number of people who have an AMEX/VISA (credit type). And debit cards work everywhere. I've used my VISA Electron (debit) pretty much everywhere in the developed world, both online and travelling abroad.
"everyone I know" is not a useful sample to approximate the customers of an online business with international customers. Where payment options are concerned, VISA/Mastercard branded debit cards are the exact same thing as credit cards. And in many countries, the average citizen has neither. They may have a debit card that's part of some national payment network, they may be used to buying stuff online via their mobi…
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