One big advantage of PayPal over other payment methods (that's usually lost on consumers) is that they have extremely friendly merchant policies when it comes t

One big advantage of PayPal over other payment methods (that's usually lost on consumers) is that they have extremely friendly merchant policies when it comes to fraud or seller protection. With a credit card all it takes is a button press (or phone call) to reverse a charge and it gets with-held for about 90 days at best, and completely reversed with no recourse at worst. According to Stripe, card companies do not communicate back about the status of these disputes in any way, and no discussion is allowed except for one response from the merchant which requires you to send PDFs (mostly automated by Stripe). They don't even tell you if the customer withdraws the dispute and funds still get held for up to 90 days!. And valid reasons range from fraud (on the buyer side) to simply dissatisfaction with a product, all of which becomes the merchant's burden to bear. On top of that, to add insult to injury, the credit card company adds a fee to provide you with this terrible service. PayPal, and most other "payment facilitators" do a much better job handling disputes. In PayPal's case they provide a much fairer arbitration process (funds are held by PayPal, and a website with message thread is created allowing communication between the merchant, customer, and arbitrator). The whole process happens within a span of days rather than months. And PayPal manages to do this without charging any more than credit card companies do (via Stripe et al). I've also done disputes through Affirm, a PayPal competitor, and they equally handled them in a fair and easy manner. This ends up making credit cards super risky for smaller merchants if their transaction volume is low and transaction amounts are high. As someone who runs a small business I highly welcome these alternative payment facilitators, even if they charge the same rates as credit cards, because they do provide a much improved service over the old credit card companies, and that's even with all the convenience features services like Stripe provides.