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PayPal Hates Conferences – Especially OpenCamp
- mgkimsal 16y agoInteresting - I'm planning a conference soon and this makes me a bit nervous. Good luck with your fight!
- GFischer 16y agoHow is the YC-funded competition doing? ( WePay, right? http://wepay.com/ http://wepay.com/ )
- jasonlotito 16y ago> Does WePay allow international (non-US) payments? Not right now, but we hope to soon. So, still very limiting.
- maushu 16y agoYeah, might as well use a merchant account. Not cheap but still...
- il 16y agoGet a merchant account and take payments yourself. PayPal isn't worth it for anything more than selling your junk on eBay.
- neurotech1 16y agoThey seem to support "Power Sellers" very well, selling physical goods, and screw everyone else.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- neurotech1 16y agoAmazon Payments might be an option https://payments.amazon.com/ https://payments.amazon.com/ Seems like the market is there for a PayPal alternative. It would be an interesting start-up. I'm putting together a Wiki soon to spec out the project.
- johns 16y agoHaving recently talked with some people at Paypal, I would never want to deal with the regulatory challenges they have to deal with. The challenge is dealing with that and fraud. Square might be on to something with requiring credit checks, but then you're narrowing your market. Do you have some ideas for dealing with these considerable hurdles?
- neurotech1 16y agoI've been making a list of how PayPal and other companies are "regulated" by the states. eg. Transfer of money regulations. I think credit checks are overrated, as far as fraud mitigation. The relative risk profile would need to be determined. That said, OpenCamp represents a relatively low risk to PayPal in real terms. They have the event booked with the Hotel, They have real organizer profiles.
- dkuchar 16y agoThey chalk up more than $250 million in annual fraud losses as a cost of doing business - there's a network of fraud artists that have cut their teeth on the PayPal network. Being the innovator, PayPal grew up with these fraudsters, building an in-house database of knowledge about how to handle them as they cropped up one by one. If you're talking about building a PayPal competitor at this point, you're launching at a point when there isn't going to be as much investor interest in your startup combined with a mature fraud ecosystem prepared to shut it down. And those are only the problems we know of.
- ig1 16y agohttp://www.amiando.com/ http://www.amiando.com/ seems to be pretty popular among event organizers these days, there's a couple of other providers also specializing in the event ticketing market. In fact I think Amiando even did the Launch48 event which was sponsored and hosted by PayPal.
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoWe've used amiando for the MIT Enterprise Forum in South Florida. They are an absolute pleasure to work with.
- dotBen 16y agoTrue, but don't confuse ticket management for payment gateway. They are two separate steps. Honestly, EventBrite or Amiando should offer their own payments system as they easily have enough traffic to make it worthwhile I would have thought.
- jasonlbaptiste 16y agoAmiando does offer the payment gateway.
- oneplusone 16y agoBoth of them have their own payment gateway option. Eventbrite charges an additional 3% for this service.
- dotBen 16y agoMy bad. Both have moved on since I last reviewed their offerings (and ran an event). Which then prompts me to ask... why is OpenCamp not using EventBrite's own gateway then? PayPal thus circumvented.
- k33l0r 16y agoWe used Amiando for the Frozen Rails conference (http://frozenrails.eu http://frozenrails.eu) and we were pretty happy with their service.
- dotBen 16y agoI would like to know what EventBrite's take is on this (they are the ticket management agency this and most events seem to use, the facilitator of the payment to PayPal, and lead generator to PayPal). The issues PayPal are raising (Events are risky, don't make PayPal much money) are the same for every one of EventBrite's customers. On their own each event is powerless against the might of PayPal, but in aggregate EventBrite has some leverage against PayPal given the amount of business they send PayPal's way each year.
- jauer 16y agoSeems like the most straight-forward fix would be for EventBrite to handle the payments through a traditional credit card processor. I'd think they would have sufficient volume to drive the transaction costs down.
- pwim 16y agoThey do offer credit card payments.
- oneplusone 16y agoI am one of the co-founders of Guestlist. Wee are not event close to the same scale as Eventbrite, but I can give some insight. Of all the events hundreds of events we have hosted we have only ever received one complaint from a purchaser. Somebody was apparently using our service to sell "power leveling" sessions for a game the he never received the service after he paid. The ticket price in this case was $20 I believe. At the same time we have moved over $700,000 in the last 12 months all through PayPal. $20 is a very small percentage so I don't really see events as a high risk. Of course, EventBrite is much larger and they probably attract more scammers. We exclusively use PayPal as our payment processor and have yet to run into them closing down somebody's account. Our main trouble with PayPal lies in their terrible interface and people being able to override the pingback url.
- mgkimsal 16y agoThey shouldn't be able to override a pingback URL if you're using encrypted URLs. The issue I'm finding is that many shopping carts and libraries aren't using encrypted URLs. :/
- URSpider94 16y agoI agree that PayPal is acting horribly in this situation, but it is worthwhile to look at the world from their perspective. From reading many of these stories, it's clear that PayPal wants to cap their risk. For a brick-and-mortar business, their risk is the difference between sales that have been billed and product that has been received by the customer. That might account for a week or two worth of sales volume on a rolling basis, so a business doing $100k a year of PayPal transactions will typically only have $3k-$4k at risk, which is on par with what PayPal will earn by serving such an account over 18-24 months. For a conference, however, there might be six months of revenue for pre-registration before the actual event takes place. If the event planner then absconds with the money, PayPal could be on the hook for the entire amount, which has long-since been withdrawn and spent. Take that same hypothetical $100k business for a conference, now all $100k of it is at risk, and PayPal only stands to make $2,500 or so off of that. It's pretty clear that the credit card companies have PayPal by the short-and-curlies, in the sense that PayPal themselves will be on the hook for any chargebacks. I call this the "wash my Ferrari" problem. If you do a good job, you make $10. If you scratch the paint, you're out $10,000. Not a good risk. Open question to HN: how could PayPal do a better job of handling the situation?
- eru 16y agoMake the organizers purchase insurance? Don't refund the customers, in case the conference doesn't happen?
- megablast 16y agoEverybody has caught on to paypals so called "fraud protection", which often involved going to ridiculously elaborate steps to prove fraud. For a pair of pants I bought, I had to actually go to a retailer and get them to write a letter with their letter head, proving that they were a cheap copy. There is absolutely no reason a retailer would waste time doing this, why would they. They have a business to run, and are not doing a charity. So now most savvy people purchase on paypal with their credit card, and when paypal pulls something like this, they just do a chargeback or threaten to do a chargeback. Paypal are incredibly inflexible at times, their site is horrible, but they still have some advantages.
- ck2 16y agoPayPal figured out awhile ago they have millions of users and that every customer is easily replaceable. Anyone that thinks having an account for quite some time or is doing $xxxx in business per month is some kind of safety net is kidding themselves.
- yason 16y agoWhat sensible alternatives are there for PayPal with international money transfers? Is a plain wire transfer too expensive? In Europe, I'd just do a BIC+IBAN transfer to another European country.
- patio11 16y agoEuropean banks have arrangements which make that economical, but transfers between e.g. Japan and the United States or the UK and the United States cost about $60. Also, American banks put consumers through a wringer to actually effect a transfer, since it is one of the highest fraud risk operations a bank is capable of and typical American consumers do international wire transfers very seldom.
- cmelbye 16y agoI've read too many of these horror stories, and I've come to the conclusion that I will never, under any circumstances, use PayPal for anything other than small personal transactions. Even then, the fees are almost enough to make it not worthwhile at all.
- there 16y agoBut despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they’ve gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address after what kind of verification?
- FluidDjango 16y agoThe problem is that PP empowers bureaucrats (like the "Kathleen" identified in the OpenCamp story) to act capriciously, without reference to pre-established (and pre-published) standards and policies. One commenter below the OC story describes how he has used the PP/EventBrite combination successfully and comfortably for a couple years. That's great for him (for now). The problem is the unpredictability of how PP may treat any customer in the future, without regard for their past performance/association with PP (as in the OC case). Personally, given the number of (unresolved/unexplained) horror stories I have heard with PP, I would not advise anyone (ANYone) to risk any business connection with PP (beyond what they are perfectly happy to lose) - no more than I advise people to take their retirement funds to a casino.
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y agoPerfect timing. I'm about to open early-bird registration for an event ( http://www.mathsjam.com http://www.mathsjam.com ) and we're emailing people on our "registered interest" list to ask how they want to pay. We were going to offer PayPal, but this has convinced us otherwise. We will now not offer PayPal as an option. For reference, we will offer direct bank transfer and cheques in advance. We are also dealing with the venue, and they may offer CC facilities, but that's still being negotiated. I understand PayPal's position, but I'm not going to run the risk of having them continue to accept money on my behalf, then not give it to me.
- ahoyhere 16y agoHate on PayPal all you like, but next time, try opening a merchant account to charge credit cards directly. You'll need... 1. to incorporate and file an LLC agreement 2. to go in person to open a corporate bank account 3. display photo ID, in person 4. show proof of residency 5. show proof of business address 6. get checks for that biz acct 7. fax/paper mail all sorts of notarized stuff to ANOTHER company to open a merchant bank account 8. rinse and repeat to open a credit card processing account, fax/paper mail 9. talk with reps on the phone because something inevitably goes wrong 10. Pay a total of about $1200 for all the above services, 11. not to mention at least 2-3 hours of traveling around, even if you live in a city where it's all available nearby. You will also likely be subject to a personal credit check since your business is brand-spankin-new. So, yes, PayPal didn't treat you all that nicely... they treated you exactly like you'd be treated if you set up to open your own CC processing. FTR, we've had no problems selling tickets to all our events, but we didn't open a brand new PayPal account to do it - we used our longstanding one. Sounds like you opened a brand new PayPal account, right? I assume that since you mentioned that you had another, longstanding account. That's like saying "I have good credit, but my friend Joe doesn't, so we applied for the credit in Joe's name." It doesn't transfer. Also, just in case you think you should use Google Checkout instead - if you think PayPal is bad, brace yourself, since Checkout is 100x worse: http://slash7.com/2009/03/26/google-is-evil-worse-than-paypal-don-t-use-google-checkout-for-your-business/ http://slash7.com/2009/03/26/google-is-evil-worse-than-paypa...
- p858snake 16y agoHave a talk to a lawyer friend and see if it amounts to harassment/invasion of privacy? and if it does see if they will have a little talk to them about it.