8 ms·

IIRC this is not the first time this kind of bad behaviour has been reported about Paypal. I suppose you were aware of that. Did you consider Paypal's reputatio

• rbinv 10y ago
  Depending on where, what and how you're selling, offering PayPal is pretty much mandatory due to customer expectations.
  • pharrlax 10y ago
    I don't see anything PayPal offers that Stripe can't do better. Why put yourself at risk of arbitrary catastrophe at the hands of a company like PayPal that wants to act like a bank while weaseling around the legal protections against bank malfeasance?
    • foepys 10y ago
      Outside of the US and Canada credit cards are not as widespread as they need to be to base your business solely on Stripe.
      • henrikschroder 10y ago
        It would be interesting to see where in the world PayPal is big. In most parts of Europe, PayPal is pretty much unheard of, because our banks don't suck, so PayPal never offered any improvements over just regular bank transfers.
        • thesimon 10y ago
          >In most parts of Europe, PayPal is pretty much unheard of Thats depends a lot on the country though. Not accepting PayPal in Germany would probably be the same as not accepting credit card in the US. In the UK however only offering credit cards might work.
          • nkkollaw 10y ago
            Really..? I thought PayPal was extremely popular everywhere in Europe
            • henrikschroder 10y ago
              In Scandinavia, the only people who know what PayPal is are the ones who maybe bought something over eBay, or the ones wanting to send money to a friend in the US, and being completely surprised by how hard that turns out to be. There's 0 domestic use cases for PayPal there. Other parts of Europe I'm not so sure about.
              • nkkollaw 10y ago
                Really? Odd. Good to know, though.
    • k3liutZu 10y ago
      Stripe doesn't support (most) parts of the world.
    • trstowell 10y ago
      It's not always about features. Plenty of international vendors only accept PayPal transfers. It's then our discretion to not do business with those vendors but there's the rub.
    • tedmiston 10y ago
      A major difference is that customers can pay through PayPal from a PayPal balance whether they have a credit card or not. People use PayPal from person to person for B/S/T forums. The PayPal user base is bigger in this community because anyone can accept payments without being a merchant, yet unlike dealing over Venmo there are still protections for the buyer. Also, accepting payments worldwide is much more feasible. Stripe is in 25 countries [1]; PayPal is in 200 [2]. [1]: https://stripe.com/global https://stripe.com/global [2]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide
      • Sir_Substance 10y ago
        >A major difference is that customers can pay through PayPal from a PayPal balance whether they have a credit card or not. Customers can pay through Visa whether they have a credit card or not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Electron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Electron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Debit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Debit As far as I can tell it might be only USA banks that don't issue these kinds of cards as standard, in place of a bank card.
        • AnkhMorporkian 10y ago
          Those cards are pretty standard in America too. If you open a checking account, you'll almost certainly get a Visa or Mastercard credit/debit card.
        • tedmiston 10y ago
          You're right — to clarify, I was trying to make the point that one can pay via PayPal with their PayPal account balance, as opposed to via any type of card (credit, debit, ATM, prepaid Visa gift card, etc). So, one can use PayPal without a credit or debit card. Stripe does not offer anything analogous to that. I'm not sure about other countries but in the US, it is possible to open a bank account without a debit card attached to it.
          • cowsandmilk 10y ago
    • analog31 10y ago
      For me, the advantage of PayPal is that I don't need to host my own web server (at home or in the cloud) and maintain code in order to take credit card payments. I realize it's just programming, but it's programming that I don't trust myself to do in a way that's reliable and secure. Also, PP makes my accounting extremely easy. I use my PP debit card for all of my business purchases, so I just download a CSV of the entire year's transactions, and compute my results in a spreadsheet, for my taxes. Given the horror stories, I realize it's a risk, and I periodically go out and look for alternatives. Best case would be to have two options for customers, so my business could at least take orders even if one of the two goes down.
      • galvin 10y ago
        You could use a business bank account with an associated debit card. Continue accepting PayPal but only use it as a processor and transfer funds to your business account regularly. This also makes it easier to have multiple payment methods, like if you want to test Stripe. It's a little bit more work but it's probably worth it. Oh, and most banks let you download some sort of spreadsheet for accounting.
    • sabslaurent 10y ago
      Shopify doesn't allow Stripe, they force you to use Shopify Payments which I have no interest in using, they set their own rules and guidelines that I do not approve of.
      • kejaed 10y ago
        Shopify Payments is Stripe on the back end though, what rules do they put on top?
        • sabslaurent 10y ago
          For one, Payouts are 7-days in arrear where as with Paypal it's instant. Second, Shopify just started with this processing thing and they are amateurs at it, support has been horrible and they also keep changing their rules and requirements since this is all new to them. The shopify payments team also does not get on the phone, just email, i try and stay away from companies that do that. The irony is paypal just did it to me...
  • intrasight 10y ago
    I'd like to hear more specifics. It's hard for me to fathom a market where using a shady outfit like PayPal would be "mandatory" - unless the market itself is shady.
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      Ever hear of EBay? The whole thing is shady, and PayPal is a defacto requirement.
      • intrasight 10y ago
        Yes it is. But I assume the OP wasn't talking about eBay.
  • Sir_Substance 10y ago
    That wisdom is past it's use-by date. Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account[1]. Prior to this, paypal gave you access to an audience of anyone with a credit card. Now that they don't, your low-friction audience is restricted to people with actively used paypal accounts, which is pretty much 15-30 year old guys, and no one else. If you know anything about online sales, you'll know that any increased friction at checkout is a bad thing. Requiring people to make a paypal account at checkout time is probably dropping 20% of all customers and 70% of customers over 50. If you wanted to know why physical shops still exist, that's why. You get a vastly wider reach with plain old Visa/Mastercard support, because anyone with a credit card can use it, no signup required. All adults have at least a Visa Electron (or regional equivalent), even if they don't have a real credit card, because that's what banks give out by default these days. Hell, most children will have them. Normal credit card support is fine. [1] By default at least. Paypals documentation[2] states this is still possible, but I haven't seen it work on any paypal shop for around a year, so either it's broken and they don't care or maybe no one reads the docs? [2] https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/account-optional https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/account-optional
    • dhimes 10y ago
      I did it a couple of days back, so it still works. I have a paypal account for business, but not personal shopping. So I always use paypal simply as a payment processor for personal items.
    • pietroalbini 10y ago
      At least from Italy I'm still able to use PayPal without an account, FYI
      • user5994461 10y ago
        Same from France and UK.
    • JimDabell 10y ago
      > Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account > Paypals documentation[2] states this is still possible, but I haven't seen it work on any paypal shop for around a year, so either it's broken and they don't care or maybe no one reads the docs? From the last time I had to evaluate PayPal as an option, I seem to recall that they only allow people to make payments without an account a certain number of times. So if you have already made a payment through PayPal without a registered account a few times, you will be forced to create an account for any future payments. You've probably made enough payments that you've gone over the limit. I can't remember what the limit is, but I remember being surprised at how low it was.
• sabslaurent 10y ago
  Paypal prides itself on being the safest payment solution online, they have easy integrations with Shopify. I don't breach their terms or perform any fraud so had no reason to suspect I'd be treated like a criminal and given inconsistency and lies by a multi billion dollar corporation I've paid thousands of dollars in fees too!
  • stingraycharles 10y ago
    That isn't really an answer to the question OP was raising, although I do sympathise with you. Having said that, Paypal is known to be very evil, and because of this I do expect people whom are still using Paypal consider this behaviour a calculated risk, rather than a surprise.
    • makemoniesonlin 10y ago
      'who', not 'whom'
      • stingraycharles 10y ago
        Thanks -- as an ESL'er, this is one of the more tricky aspects of the language to me.
  • sandworm101 10y ago
    Paypal also has a reputation for unpredictability and politically-motivated action against users. The rise of cryptocurrencies in recent years was largely a result of how paypal and credit card companies reacted to US government "requests" (ie the blacklisting of wikileaks and vpn providers). Nobody can stop or confiscate a bitcoin transaction. Given the regs that paypal thinks it must abide, specifically the many vague US antiterror rules, anyone getting into bed with them runs massive risk. The internet is full of stories exactly like this. The only hope is to rally enough of social media, or a tv show, that a human being at paypal takes pitty in you.
  • pgaddict 10y ago
    The fact that PayPal claims to be the safest payment solution is pretty irrelevant, especially if it's meant to be safest for the buyers and you're the seller. This is not the first story of PayPal freezing accounts with substantial amounts of money and not talking to the account owner. Also, their ToS are pretty clear that they can do whatever they want, based on their beliefs, and there are no explicit limits how long they can keep your funds, or even obligations to talk to you. It might work differently in the EU, where they are registered as a bank (and so are regulated as a bank), but in US that's not the case IIRC. The behavior is not all that unexpected - it's easier and cheaper to loose a customer receiving a lot of complaints than to inspect each of the complaints. So while I understand this is pretty damaging and dislike what PayPal does, I'm surprised that people are surprised.
• mootothemax 10y ago
  Can you think of many payment processors that would tolerate an ongoing 2% chargeback rate?
  • sabslaurent 10y ago
    Of course, many do in fact. Despite that, Paypal saw my high-dispute rate and worked out a plan where they will have a set reserve of $5000 + a 10% rolling reserve in order to mitigate risk and work with me. They then called me on 3 separate occasions to ask questions and see how the business was going, not once did they say my dispute rate is too high for them or that I'm at risk of losing my account. They just randomly gave me the hammer one day and use automated emails to circumvent any request I may have. They are inconsistent, rude, lying and simply provide 0 customer service while holding my money simply because their "system" said so!
    • mootothemax 10y ago
      Totally agree, high risk processors who charge 15%+ on top of interchange exist. Those competing against PayPal? Not so much.
    • jasode 10y ago
      >Of course, many do in fact. No mainstream cc merchant account bank and payment processor will accept 1%+ chargebacks. That type of account is categorized as "high risk" and you have to resort to processors that specialize in that area (e.g. adult, gambling, etc). One example says they can handle up to 3% chargebacks.[1] They will definitely make you pay for that privilege in multiple ways: higher setup fees, higher monthly service fees, higher transaction fees, higher reserve, longer hold times before releasing funds to you, etc. I'm frankly astounded that PayPal was willing to let a 2% chargeback go on as long as you said they did. All my previous reading about PayPal's contentious relationship with VISA/MC network & member banks was that they do not want to be associated with "high risk" accounts. [1] https://www.emerchantbroker.com/blog/need-a-payment-processor-for-your-adult-business/ https://www.emerchantbroker.com/blog/need-a-payment-processo...
    • ryanlol 10y ago