I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable.
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
I have my lived experience, which take it for the anecdata it is:
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
I believe that after 10k USD additional AML regulations kick in. Then there are a related class of pseudo-crimes around structuring payments to avoid the 10k threshold. Part of it may be PayPal's policies, but as I understand these things are generally to cover things on their end from regulatory risk factors.
That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.
My credit card company has a "dispute charge" button in the transaction history. It's one click. Sounds like you should look into a different provider.
with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
I had PayPal side with a clear scammer for almost $5k. PayPal declined, and I also tried leaving negative BBB feedback which I heard can help. In the end I had to do credit card chargebacks, which thankfully succeeded.
I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way.
That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
> and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment).
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
> These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders.
Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
I like to use PayPal when signing up for subscription services with recurring charges. It keeps billers that you have authorised in a nice list and you can cancel/deauthorise them directly from PayPal. No surprise charges months/years later from something you signed up for and forgot about...
> that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens)
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
Same as if Paypal screws me, or the store I just bought something in... you talk to them and if they don't cooperate you take it to court (small claims hopefully). So far, nobody I know has needed to take a shop to court. It's extremely rare, but yes it sure happens
If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
PayPal is an excellent product for consumers. The periodic horror stories that appear on this site are relatively rare and typically only affect businesses.
I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets.
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
None of my clients can pay me for my work in bitcoin without first turning real money into bitcoin, with fees involved. I can't pay my rent with bitcoin without turning it into real money, with fees involved. I can't go to the market and buy food with bitcoin. I can't see someone begging outside Walgreens and help them out with some bitcoin. Bitcoin's also volatile enough that there's a significant risk of its value dropping on the floor between the time I receive it and try to use it. It's a fine Ponzi scam but it's utterly useless for replacing USD.
Maybe you live somewhere that your landlord takes bitcoin, that's nice for you, my landlord wants USD. If you would like to fund me finding out if my landlord will actually take bitcoin if I ask nicely enough then please feel free to send a couple bitcoins to 3CzUW828J2u5wCB2xD4iE9kH8dPTokjxow.
I used to use both PayPal and Stripe for my online business
Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees
I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed
My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow
It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use).
Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.
Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.
I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable.
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
Indeed, my orders never exceed 100 bucks, and I have an automatic sweep into my bank account when it exceeds X dollars.
Might not be enough. PayPal is notorious for draining connected bank accounts in some cases.
That would be next level... do you have any links to examples?
I have my lived experience, which take it for the anecdata it is:
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
I believe that after 10k USD additional AML regulations kick in. Then there are a related class of pseudo-crimes around structuring payments to avoid the 10k threshold. Part of it may be PayPal's policies, but as I understand these things are generally to cover things on their end from regulatory risk factors.
That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
[1] https://embolt.app
Plus the convenience for users. Don't make me fill dozens of fields on some forms every time I want to buy something.
Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.
After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.
My credit card company has a "dispute charge" button in the transaction history. It's one click. Sounds like you should look into a different provider.
> who wants to reach the point where you find that out?
Enough people to steal 20 billion USD a year according to https://stripe.com/en-fr/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101
A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.
with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
I had PayPal side with a clear scammer for almost $5k. PayPal declined, and I also tried leaving negative BBB feedback which I heard can help. In the end I had to do credit card chargebacks, which thankfully succeeded.
In the real world, not in computer user world, people use what is avilable to them that works. Paypal is that.
I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way. That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
> and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment).
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
> These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders.
Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
Right!
I like to use PayPal when signing up for subscription services with recurring charges. It keeps billers that you have authorised in a nice list and you can cancel/deauthorise them directly from PayPal. No surprise charges months/years later from something you signed up for and forgot about...
> that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
Nonprofits are major targets of card testing fraud, I wonder if that is related
Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens)
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
If the merchant screws you on a transaction paid via IBAN transfer, how do you get your money back?
Same as if Paypal screws me, or the store I just bought something in... you talk to them and if they don't cooperate you take it to court (small claims hopefully). So far, nobody I know has needed to take a shop to court. It's extremely rare, but yes it sure happens
If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
PayPal is an excellent product for consumers. The periodic horror stories that appear on this site are relatively rare and typically only affect businesses.
I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets.
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
They're not as openly shitty at least.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
It hasn't solved the problem it set out to solve. We still have to chose between untrustworthy middlemen for handling our payment infrastructure.
It gave up a decade ago. I wouldn't call that "working out".
None of my clients can pay me for my work in bitcoin without first turning real money into bitcoin, with fees involved. I can't pay my rent with bitcoin without turning it into real money, with fees involved. I can't go to the market and buy food with bitcoin. I can't see someone begging outside Walgreens and help them out with some bitcoin. Bitcoin's also volatile enough that there's a significant risk of its value dropping on the floor between the time I receive it and try to use it. It's a fine Ponzi scam but it's utterly useless for replacing USD.
Maybe you live somewhere that your landlord takes bitcoin, that's nice for you, my landlord wants USD. If you would like to fund me finding out if my landlord will actually take bitcoin if I ask nicely enough then please feel free to send a couple bitcoins to 3CzUW828J2u5wCB2xD4iE9kH8dPTokjxow.
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I would never pay for digital goods with Zelle.
I used to use both PayPal and Stripe for my online business
Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees
I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed
My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow
It's pretty convenient when it's offered as a checkout option and it lets you avoid filling in your details yet again.
I wouldn't store any money in it though.
Major browsers have been doing that for what, 10 years?
And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use).
Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.
Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.
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