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Good riddance, PayPal

elliotjaystocks.com

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Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#61

Post by gadders »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #39
philhippus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Moneybookers has been rebranded, now called Skrill.

So they have! I knew they were transitioning, but it appears they're just about done with the change. Skrill is such an awful name IMHO!

"Skrilla" is slang for money: www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=skrilla

See also the lyrics for "Cash in My Pocket" by Wiley:

> All I really want is money in my pocket

> Cash in my hand, oh, skrilla in my wallet

> All I really want is money in my pocket

> Cash in my hand and skrilla in my wallet, yeah

http://www.metrolyrics.com/cash-in-my-pocket-lyrics-wiley.ht...

NB: This doesn't stop it still being an awful name, but it might explain why they chose it.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#63

Post by nmcfarl »

robomartin wrote: post #56

I 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 tryi…

My company empties our PayPal account 2x a month, at which point it's well into 5 digits, and we've been doing this for ~5 years. If emptying accounts is a red flag, it's never hit us.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#64

Post by verelo »

axefrog wrote: post #5
verelo wrote: 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…

We're in Canada using Stripe, we actually managed to get in before they even started their Canadian beta. You dont need to be in the US, you just need a US bank account and postage address.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#66

Post by jusben1369 »

PayPal charges substantially less than a traditional merchant account and payment gateway. Particularly in the UK. It would be interesting if the OP touched upon that. They're also easier and faster to set up than a merchant account/payment gateway.

In return for being cheaper and faster there are trade offs. As stated in the article, this person's business model is a "high risk" one in general and to PayPal in particular. This is a great example of where a merchant account with a bank really is the better option. They need to met you, understand your business and why it works the way it does. Once done, you're less likely to have ongoing issues. So, you can keep your "higher risk" business model and change from PayPal or you can change your business model to better fit with PayPal. I don't think you can have both.

PayPal is a family sedan. This guy is lamenting that his vehicle doesn't perform the way he wants it to at high speed on twisty mountain roads. Seems like an unfair car review in that sense.

As others noted - it would look very strange to PayPal if you basically pull all your funds two days after that call. Who knows what else he inadvertently did to raise suspicion.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#67

Post by iProject »

robomartin wrote: post #56

I 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 tryi…

>the OP may have triggered the freeze by clearing the account of nearly all funds a couple of days after the phone interview.

It would be very helpful for someone to post (from experience and/or inside knowledge) a "How work with PayPal and avoid problems" FAQ

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#68

Post by reitzensteinm »

scottshea wrote: post #58
reitzensteinm wrote: post #35

The 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?

Frankly, yes.

The merchant is, if I understand the post correctly, taking orders, using the money to print a run, then shipping them.

The risk is caused by the merchant's business model. It may not be high, but it certainly exists. Either the merchant, PayPal or consumers themselves must pay for it.

Who would you pick?

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#69

Post by DanBC »

mattmanser wrote: post #18
dangrossman wrote: post #12

The premise of his "vehemence" is untrue: banks can and do have the exact same policy regarding terminating merchant services accounts. They can terminate you at any time, without reason, and when they do so, hold any undisbursed funds in a reserve account for exactly 180 days. There is no regulation banks are subject to that PayPal isn't that would have an affect on that. PayPal did not make up this policy; it's bas…

Just to note, the's author's not in the US, he's in the UK and Paypal's a regulated bank over here. I always have mixed feeling on these stories. On the one hand, if you operate almost entirely online, you're in amidst a mass of scammers and conmen, it's a much higher risk, hence everything being more draconian. So there's always problems. Brick and mortar businesses are much less as there's a real presence, etc. On…

> On the other hand, this is a long established business.

8Faces has been in print since 2010. That's a great start. It's not a really long time. Issue 5 is ready to pre-order. (Weirdly the author claims that they don't really do pre-orders, but on the website there is a huge banner telling people that they can pre-order issue 5.)

Magazine publishing is notoriously tricky, especially in the UK.

> Why can't Paypal treat them more respectfully as there's plenty of trading history. Why are there no mechanisms for establishing real identities that are much stronger than what they seem to be doing?

This is an excellent point. I can understand why Paypal don't have customer reps for every little nickel and dime trader, but a magazine doing £15,000 per issue is reasonably substantial amount of money. It'd be great if Paypal could establish identities (interviews? documentation?) and build relationships with the honest traders that use the service.

Re: Good riddance, PayPal

#70

Post by nmcfarl »

Irfaan wrote: post #6
pytrin wrote: post #2

Paypal 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…

When launched both of these products were problematic, Google from the UI side, Amazon from both the API side and the UI side. And the network effects suck - no one has accounts.

We axed amazon soon after we integrated with them - I gather that now both the API and more importantly the UI are much better, and people can sucessfully use their pre-existing amazon accounts. That would be huge.

Google we still support, but it's usage has plummeted from a low starting place on our site. It'll be dropped on the next rev of the our UI.

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