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I have a client who is a payment processor who specializes in high risk transactions. Paypal is not. The problem though is that Paypals definition of risk can

I have a client who is a payment processor who specializes in high risk transactions. Paypal is not. The problem though is that Paypals definition of risk can be overinclusive to the point of being arbitrary. When I had my account frozen, I was told it was because my wife had sent money to someone else who was accused of violating the ToS. So here we have an account suspended because someone from the same IP address sent money to someone else, and that third party was accused of violating the ToS. I wrote them a nice nastygram, stopped taking credit cards for a while, and later started up again with Amazon Payments instead. Fraud of this sort of thing is a difficult thing to solve. I don't envy Paypal's position here. However, their approaches are unprofessional at best....

bigiain 15y ago
"I don't envy Paypal's position here. However, their approaches are unprofessional at best..." From one point of view, they're no more "unprofessional" with their customer service than Google. At least there was a phone number to call and a person to answer it - even if they were apparently not highly trained enough or authorized to solve the problem. Paypal are trying to solve the credit card version of "web scale" - they've got their almighty "fraud detection algorithm", with the knobs inevitably turned towards "risk pissing off low value customers" rather than "risk letting through financial risk exposing transactions". When you want to let everyone with a hotmail account and a prepaid debit card become a "merchant", it's inevitable that there are going to be _lots_ of edge cases, and not nearly enough skilled customer service people. If you can look critically at what you're doing, and it seems like it _might_ be an "edge case", you might want to think twice about using Paypal.
- einhverfr 15y ago
  If you can look critically at what you're doing, and it seems like it _might_ be an "edge case", you might want to think twice about using Paypal. Given that in my case, IT services were an "edge case" I would suggest that we can just shorten that to "you might want to think twice about using Paypal."
  - bigiain 15y ago
    Yep, if you do anything except put things in boxes and ship them via FedEx directly to billing addresses, you're not really part of their core business.

bigiain 15y ago

"I don't envy Paypal's position here. However, their approaches are unprofessional at best..." From one point of view, they're no more "unprofessional" with their customer service than Google. At least there was a phone number to call and a person to answer it - even if they were apparently not highly trained enough or authorized to solve the problem. Paypal are trying to solve the credit card version of "web scale" - they've got their almighty "fraud detection algorithm", with the knobs inevitably turned towards "risk pissing off low value customers" rather than "risk letting through financial risk exposing transactions". When you want to let everyone with a hotmail account and a prepaid debit card become a "merchant", it's inevitable that there are going to be _lots_ of edge cases, and not nearly enough skilled customer service people. If you can look critically at what you're doing, and it seems like it _might_ be an "edge case", you might want to think twice about using Paypal.

einhverfr 15y ago
If you can look critically at what you're doing, and it seems like it _might_ be an "edge case", you might want to think twice about using Paypal. Given that in my case, IT services were an "edge case" I would suggest that we can just shorten that to "you might want to think twice about using Paypal."
- bigiain 15y ago
  Yep, if you do anything except put things in boxes and ship them via FedEx directly to billing addresses, you're not really part of their core business.