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We hear a lot from people who have had a bad experience using PayPal. But is there anyone who has had a good experience, either as a merchant, or as a customer

by bsuvc 4y ago

We hear a lot from people who have had a bad experience using PayPal. But is there anyone who has had a good experience, either as a merchant, or as a customer?

gnufied 4y ago
Even though sometimes using Paypal causes me to lose "reward" points, I do use quite a bit. For things like annual domain renewal - it is a life saver. I have had my domain expire far too many times with Credit Cards.
- lxgr 4y ago
  Can't you use rewards credit cards at practically all PayPal-accepting merchants?
fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
Sure, I buy things through PayPal a lot. It’s purely out of convenience. It saves me the steps of entering in my address and credit card info when buying something online. If the checkout page offers Apple Pay or Stripe, I’ll use those instead, because they’re even easier. I’ve never had any problems with any of these payment services. I also like that both PayPal and Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions, so I don’t have to argue with someone on the phone to cancel. My understanding is that Apple subscriptions incur a 30% fee for the developer (and often a price hike for me), so it’s nice that PayPal offers something similar without that fee.
- derkades 4y ago
  PayPal still charges about a 3-4% + 50 cent fee. Not as large as the exorbitant 30%, but still a lot compared to the tens of cents it costs for IBAN payments in the EU
  - arp242 4y ago
    Credit cards charge something similar, I think? Unfortunately not everyone accepts IBAN, and I don't have a credit/debit card at the moment (they're not common here), so PayPal provides an okay solution for now. I pay my Linode VPS with it for example, because that's essentially the only option I have at the moment.
  - jeromegv 4y ago
    Sure but PayPal in North America is not competing against EU. It is competing with Square, Stripe, etc, and those fees are quite close to those other companies.
  - pragmatick 4y ago
    The german antitrust agency recently started an investigation into PayPal because they forbid businesses to offer lower prices to customers which use a different paying method. If they succeed pressure on PayPal might increase if you pay 2% or so less for using a bank payment.
- bburnett44 4y ago
  Apple doesn’t charge merchants anything for using Apple Pay, they charge the banks for being able to have their cards in Apple wallet. Merchants still get charged by the banks but Apple doesn’t take anything from them. The 30% fees is on App Store purchases
  - fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
    Is there any way to subscribe to a service using Apple Pay without it counting as App Store and incurring the 30%? There’s a lot of news stories about Spotify, Netflix, etc fighting with Apple over this.
    - bburnett44 4y ago
      Apple Pay (like Apple wallet) doesn’t charge anything inherently. If you’re buying a subscription (like to an app) through the App Store, with or without Apple Pay, they charge 30%. These are two different things.
- lxgr 4y ago
  [...] Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions [...] That's only a thing for Apple in-app subscribtions though, not for Apple Pay, right? Supposedly there is a new management UI for recurring payments at supported merchants/PSPs, but I haven't encountered it in the wild yet: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213041 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213041 https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/merchant-tokens/ https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/merchant-tokens/
  - indiscriminator 4y ago
    This was announced at WWDC in 2022 but payment gateways are still adding support for it. Should be more visible in 2023.
alistairSH 4y ago
Customer. Use it for online shopping when Apple Pay isn’t available. Also for “friends” payments buying used things from Craigslist or FB market. No complaints.
herpdyderp 4y ago
I've never had a bad experience with PayPal and there ain't no way I'm handing out my raw credit card info to another website so they can get hacked and leak it.
AussieWog93 4y ago
Yeah, I've sold over $1M worth of stuff on eBay since 2011 and have mostly good things to say about them. Much better support than eBay or Amazon, at least for merchants, and the few times I've needed them as a customer they've helped me out. Even one time when I was socially engineered into ticking the "item received" when I hadn't received the item, they helped me get a refund. I think a lot of the bad stories you hear about them come from people upset at the customer being always given the benefit of the doubt, even in suspicious fraud situations (e.g. where the customer has 3 positive feedback and the seller has 10,000). It's bullshit, but from a business perspective it's a small price to pay so that your customers don't think "am I about to get scammed?" every time they click the Buy It Now button. If you drill down a bit too, you'll find a sizable minority of people who lost their shit at support staff then act surprised when they don't get any help.
- illiac786 4y ago
  I can assure you the customer experience, when the purchase is above a 1000$, is also atrocious. They will send you in circles. Scammers do use paypal, there's a reason.
- moneywoes 4y ago
  > was socially engineered into ticking the "item received How?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
kiwijamo 4y ago
I use it for small recurring payments to some online services. Some online services only accept Paypal so I just pay via Paypal using my stored Amex/Visa details and Paypal process the payment and passes it on to the service operator. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Also means I only need to update my card details in one place when I switch cards or get a replacement card. No problems and in some ways the UX is better than using a traditional Visa/MC/Amex processor.
nightski 4y ago
I use it as a customer quite a bit, it works well and I have no complaints.
AdamGibbins 4y ago
I use Paypal a fair bit to pay via Amex in the UK, where the underlying store doesn't take Amex but does Paypal. No complaints there.
alpaca128 4y ago
I use Paypal for 100% of online payments and never encountered any issues.
modriano 4y ago
It makes a lot of my transactions very low friction and significantly increases my willingness to buy things from small independent sellers on the web. I don't really ever have to think about PayPal, but now that your question has made me stop and think about it, I quite like PayPal and think it's quite a good bit of infrastructure.
tomcam 4y ago
20 years with them, took about $20 million in payments, never a problem
dnissley 4y ago
Use it as a customer and have never had anything but good experiences -- have only heard of complaints from the merchant side.
pc86 4y ago
As a customer, absolutely. I don't have my CC info memorized, and I can log in via PayPal and pay with almost any of them. I've never heard a business prefer PayPal over CCs but maybe there are some.
clint 4y ago
The millions and millions of people and businesses who use Paypal every day, without issue, presumably. 100Bn of TPV flows through Paypal every month, why do you think all those people trust their money with Paypal?
brightlancer 4y ago
This is a general statement about many companies, though PayPal is an example of it: The company was great to work with until it wasn't. Most people, most of the time, will have no major issue (and few minor ones) and wonder what the hubbub is about; a minority of people, a minority of time, will have lots of minor issues and a few major ones, and some of them will be _devastated_ by the experience. All of this is to say: You will find lots of folks who've loved PP and had zero issues, but when the company is that size, a 0.001% error rate screws over a lot of paying customers.
impulser_ 4y ago
I love using PayPal as my checkout option. Makes it super easy when you get a new card or a card expires to simply change the card in PayPal without having to go through and change the card everywhere you used it. I know PayPal gets a bunch of hate for some of their business practices, but I think most of that comes down to them being in the financial services industry which is the most regulated industry to operate your business in. This is the reason why you don't see much competition when it comes to payment processing.
lmm 4y ago
As a customer they're great, especially as someone who moved internationally and so needed to use a "foreign" credit card to pay for things for a while. Being able to pay everywhere with a consistent UI and have my payment history (and manage which card I'm using) in one place is really nice.
heavyset_go 4y ago
They were quick to refund my money after receiving seriously damaged goods. That said, I would never trust them as a business owner. They are too happy to freeze funds and then never release them.
SCLeo 4y ago
I also use PayPal a lot. It is more convenient since I don't have to find my credit card to enter the digits manually. It is also easier to change payment methods with PayPal.
rqtwteye 4y ago
As a customer PayPal works great for me. I much prefer it over typing my credit card number. Subscriptions over PayPal also work well. Just cancel in PayPal and it’s done.
nextlevelwizard 4y ago
I have never had bad experience with PayPal. I use it always when it an option and I give out my credit card info very rarely (e.g. it has to be actually life altering product/service and not support PayPal for me to input my credit card details.) If I was sponsoring someone this change would put end to that. I don't want to give my credit card details to Github.
SergeAx 4y ago
There was a moment when I needed to buy an expensive ticket from Qatar and their Visa processor was unable to bill my card. PayPal managed to get my money to airline. I appreciate that, but still thiunk that creating user experience worse than that of PayPal is a non-trivial feat.
- eXpl0it3r 4y ago
  What's so extremely terrible about the user experience? As a regular user, I can't think of anything that would've annoyed me, beyond sending official emails that look like phishing emails, and then support not even being able to always distinguish whether it's a valid email or not. Other than that, I've added a credit card, can press the pay with paypal button, login and pay for my goods. Nothing to complain in this loop really, so I'm curious what your perspective is.
  - SergeAx 4y ago
    TBCH, my pain was on the other path - getting money out of the system and into my bank (I am not in US). Also PayPal never let me make a payment with just a card, without logging in to the system.
solarkraft 4y ago
I consistently have a pretty good experience with PayPal if you discount the ads and nags on the Website. The merchant "horror stories" actually give me a lot of confidence that whoever I buy from will be sufficiently motivated to fulfill their side of the contract.
jrochkind1 4y ago
Of course. As a customer I use paypal routinely. I like that I have it set up to pull directly from my bank account (instead of going on a credit card bill to pay, possibly with interest), and that I just have to log in to paypal to make a purchase, and not enter any other numbers, or share my credit card number on an additional form/system that might get hacked. If a vendor offers paypal as a payment method, I almost always choose it. I have no particular loyalty to paypal, if another similar option were available I'd be happy to use it, paypal has just gotten such market penetration as non-visa/mastercard payment method. Nobody offers a "pay with venmo" checkout option.
mikhailt 4y ago
I trust PayPal as the default payment method, I do not want to provide my cc details to any random store that may have questionable security. I never had a single issue with PayPal. Apple Pay is getting there as well.

by bsuvc 4y ago

We hear a lot from people who have had a bad experience using PayPal. But is there anyone who has had a good experience, either as a merchant, or as a customer?

gnufied 4y ago

Even though sometimes using Paypal causes me to lose "reward" points, I do use quite a bit. For things like annual domain renewal - it is a life saver. I have had my domain expire far too many times with Credit Cards.

lxgr 4y ago
Can't you use rewards credit cards at practically all PayPal-accepting merchants?

fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago

Sure, I buy things through PayPal a lot. It’s purely out of convenience. It saves me the steps of entering in my address and credit card info when buying something online. If the checkout page offers Apple Pay or Stripe, I’ll use those instead, because they’re even easier. I’ve never had any problems with any of these payment services. I also like that both PayPal and Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions, so I don’t have to argue with someone on the phone to cancel. My understanding is that Apple subscriptions incur a 30% fee for the developer (and often a price hike for me), so it’s nice that PayPal offers something similar without that fee.

derkades 4y ago
PayPal still charges about a 3-4% + 50 cent fee. Not as large as the exorbitant 30%, but still a lot compared to the tens of cents it costs for IBAN payments in the EU
- arp242 4y ago
  Credit cards charge something similar, I think? Unfortunately not everyone accepts IBAN, and I don't have a credit/debit card at the moment (they're not common here), so PayPal provides an okay solution for now. I pay my Linode VPS with it for example, because that's essentially the only option I have at the moment.
- jeromegv 4y ago
  Sure but PayPal in North America is not competing against EU. It is competing with Square, Stripe, etc, and those fees are quite close to those other companies.
- pragmatick 4y ago
  The german antitrust agency recently started an investigation into PayPal because they forbid businesses to offer lower prices to customers which use a different paying method. If they succeed pressure on PayPal might increase if you pay 2% or so less for using a bank payment.
bburnett44 4y ago
Apple doesn’t charge merchants anything for using Apple Pay, they charge the banks for being able to have their cards in Apple wallet. Merchants still get charged by the banks but Apple doesn’t take anything from them. The 30% fees is on App Store purchases
- fshbbdssbbgdd 4y ago
  Is there any way to subscribe to a service using Apple Pay without it counting as App Store and incurring the 30%? There’s a lot of news stories about Spotify, Netflix, etc fighting with Apple over this.
  - bburnett44 4y ago
    Apple Pay (like Apple wallet) doesn’t charge anything inherently. If you’re buying a subscription (like to an app) through the App Store, with or without Apple Pay, they charge 30%. These are two different things.
lxgr 4y ago
[...] Apple provide a centralized UI where I can revoke payment authorization for subscriptions [...] That's only a thing for Apple in-app subscribtions though, not for Apple Pay, right? Supposedly there is a new management UI for recurring payments at supported merchants/PSPs, but I haven't encountered it in the wild yet: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213041 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213041 https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/merchant-tokens/ https://developer.apple.com/apple-pay/merchant-tokens/
- indiscriminator 4y ago
  This was announced at WWDC in 2022 but payment gateways are still adding support for it. Should be more visible in 2023.

alistairSH 4y ago

Customer. Use it for online shopping when Apple Pay isn’t available. Also for “friends” payments buying used things from Craigslist or FB market. No complaints.

herpdyderp 4y ago

I've never had a bad experience with PayPal and there ain't no way I'm handing out my raw credit card info to another website so they can get hacked and leak it.

AussieWog93 4y ago

Yeah, I've sold over $1M worth of stuff on eBay since 2011 and have mostly good things to say about them. Much better support than eBay or Amazon, at least for merchants, and the few times I've needed them as a customer they've helped me out. Even one time when I was socially engineered into ticking the "item received" when I hadn't received the item, they helped me get a refund. I think a lot of the bad stories you hear about them come from people upset at the customer being always given the benefit of the doubt, even in suspicious fraud situations (e.g. where the customer has 3 positive feedback and the seller has 10,000). It's bullshit, but from a business perspective it's a small price to pay so that your customers don't think "am I about to get scammed?" every time they click the Buy It Now button. If you drill down a bit too, you'll find a sizable minority of people who lost their shit at support staff then act surprised when they don't get any help.

illiac786 4y ago
I can assure you the customer experience, when the purchase is above a 1000$, is also atrocious. They will send you in circles. Scammers do use paypal, there's a reason.
moneywoes 4y ago
> was socially engineered into ticking the "item received How?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

kiwijamo 4y ago

I use it for small recurring payments to some online services. Some online services only accept Paypal so I just pay via Paypal using my stored Amex/Visa details and Paypal process the payment and passes it on to the service operator. Does exactly what it says on the tin. Also means I only need to update my card details in one place when I switch cards or get a replacement card. No problems and in some ways the UX is better than using a traditional Visa/MC/Amex processor.

nightski 4y ago

I use it as a customer quite a bit, it works well and I have no complaints.

AdamGibbins 4y ago

I use Paypal a fair bit to pay via Amex in the UK, where the underlying store doesn't take Amex but does Paypal. No complaints there.

alpaca128 4y ago

I use Paypal for 100% of online payments and never encountered any issues.

modriano 4y ago

It makes a lot of my transactions very low friction and significantly increases my willingness to buy things from small independent sellers on the web. I don't really ever have to think about PayPal, but now that your question has made me stop and think about it, I quite like PayPal and think it's quite a good bit of infrastructure.

tomcam 4y ago

20 years with them, took about $20 million in payments, never a problem

dnissley 4y ago

Use it as a customer and have never had anything but good experiences -- have only heard of complaints from the merchant side.

pc86 4y ago

As a customer, absolutely. I don't have my CC info memorized, and I can log in via PayPal and pay with almost any of them. I've never heard a business prefer PayPal over CCs but maybe there are some.

clint 4y ago

The millions and millions of people and businesses who use Paypal every day, without issue, presumably. 100Bn of TPV flows through Paypal every month, why do you think all those people trust their money with Paypal?

brightlancer 4y ago

This is a general statement about many companies, though PayPal is an example of it: The company was great to work with until it wasn't. Most people, most of the time, will have no major issue (and few minor ones) and wonder what the hubbub is about; a minority of people, a minority of time, will have lots of minor issues and a few major ones, and some of them will be _devastated_ by the experience. All of this is to say: You will find lots of folks who've loved PP and had zero issues, but when the company is that size, a 0.001% error rate screws over a lot of paying customers.

impulser_ 4y ago

I love using PayPal as my checkout option. Makes it super easy when you get a new card or a card expires to simply change the card in PayPal without having to go through and change the card everywhere you used it. I know PayPal gets a bunch of hate for some of their business practices, but I think most of that comes down to them being in the financial services industry which is the most regulated industry to operate your business in. This is the reason why you don't see much competition when it comes to payment processing.

lmm 4y ago

As a customer they're great, especially as someone who moved internationally and so needed to use a "foreign" credit card to pay for things for a while. Being able to pay everywhere with a consistent UI and have my payment history (and manage which card I'm using) in one place is really nice.

heavyset_go 4y ago

They were quick to refund my money after receiving seriously damaged goods. That said, I would never trust them as a business owner. They are too happy to freeze funds and then never release them.

SCLeo 4y ago

I also use PayPal a lot. It is more convenient since I don't have to find my credit card to enter the digits manually. It is also easier to change payment methods with PayPal.

rqtwteye 4y ago

As a customer PayPal works great for me. I much prefer it over typing my credit card number. Subscriptions over PayPal also work well. Just cancel in PayPal and it’s done.

nextlevelwizard 4y ago

I have never had bad experience with PayPal. I use it always when it an option and I give out my credit card info very rarely (e.g. it has to be actually life altering product/service and not support PayPal for me to input my credit card details.) If I was sponsoring someone this change would put end to that. I don't want to give my credit card details to Github.

SergeAx 4y ago

There was a moment when I needed to buy an expensive ticket from Qatar and their Visa processor was unable to bill my card. PayPal managed to get my money to airline. I appreciate that, but still thiunk that creating user experience worse than that of PayPal is a non-trivial feat.

eXpl0it3r 4y ago
What's so extremely terrible about the user experience? As a regular user, I can't think of anything that would've annoyed me, beyond sending official emails that look like phishing emails, and then support not even being able to always distinguish whether it's a valid email or not. Other than that, I've added a credit card, can press the pay with paypal button, login and pay for my goods. Nothing to complain in this loop really, so I'm curious what your perspective is.
- SergeAx 4y ago
  TBCH, my pain was on the other path - getting money out of the system and into my bank (I am not in US). Also PayPal never let me make a payment with just a card, without logging in to the system.

solarkraft 4y ago

I consistently have a pretty good experience with PayPal if you discount the ads and nags on the Website. The merchant "horror stories" actually give me a lot of confidence that whoever I buy from will be sufficiently motivated to fulfill their side of the contract.

jrochkind1 4y ago

Of course. As a customer I use paypal routinely. I like that I have it set up to pull directly from my bank account (instead of going on a credit card bill to pay, possibly with interest), and that I just have to log in to paypal to make a purchase, and not enter any other numbers, or share my credit card number on an additional form/system that might get hacked. If a vendor offers paypal as a payment method, I almost always choose it. I have no particular loyalty to paypal, if another similar option were available I'd be happy to use it, paypal has just gotten such market penetration as non-visa/mastercard payment method. Nobody offers a "pay with venmo" checkout option.

mikhailt 4y ago

I trust PayPal as the default payment method, I do not want to provide my cc details to any random store that may have questionable security. I never had a single issue with PayPal. Apple Pay is getting there as well.