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There are always those subtle little details that get missed in these discussion. For instance the site is, right now, taking pre-orders, not orders. There is

There are always those subtle little details that get missed in these discussion. For instance the site is, right now, taking pre-orders, not orders. There is no published timeframe when they'll actually ship the books that I can see. Paypal only allows you to accept pre-orders up to 20 days in advance of shipping the product to buyers, and even then they can demand significant additional proof. Because, unfortunately, pre-orders are the classic setup of too many scams (which some random agent probably won't easily be able to eliminate), and it's the domain where PayPal ends up holding the bag. 5000 people pre-ordered some cool internet controller and then maker disappears, etc. We've been hearing these sorts of "horror" stories for years (wow do people not understand how hard and exclusive the payment process used to be!), yet despite PayPal still being relatively small -- especially compared to the banks and credit card companies -- no one is credibly doing what they do. Maybe because they're doing something rather hard?

Uchikoma 15y ago
Yes, see the debable with the JooJoo successor tablet where preorders were not fulfilled.
saurik 15y ago
Going even further, it is the stated position of most credit card companies that at the time of purchase you are only allowed to take out an "authorization" (hold) on the funds: you cannot "capture" (get) the money until you are pretty much just about to (within 24-48 hours) ship the product.
- tokenadult 15y ago
  you cannot "capture" (get) the money until you are pretty much just about to (within 24-48 hours) ship the product. I'm not sure what the general worldwide fact is for all kinds of payment processing. But it is general practice (not federal law, as I thought before editing this) in the United States that a seller can't actually get money from a transaction paid by a credit card unless the item ordered has actually entered the shipment process. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre28.shtm http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre28.shtm That's the way Amazon has always billed me, and I think it's the reason that Amazon sends me partial shipments even when I didn't ask for separate shipments when I order several items at once.
  - cperciva 15y ago
    I think it's the reason that Amazon sends me partial shipments even when I didn't ask for separate shipments when I order several items at once. That might be one of the reasons, but I'm sure the usual reason is that the items are coming from different warehouses and the logistics are easier (/cheaper) for each to ship to you directly than for them to shuffle their product around so they can send everything to you in one box.
  - pja 15y ago
    Same in the UK: You cannot (legally) charge someone for a product ordered over the internet until you have shipped it under the distance-selling regulations.
_delirium 15y ago
Kickstarter seems to have interestingly set itself up as a workable intermediary for that: you can set up a Kickstarter that is basically a glorified way of taking preorders, people can pay for them via Paypal, and generally Paypal doesn't cause trouble in those cases.
- ticks 15y ago
  Kickstarter is US-only for project creators, so it's not really an option for most people.
  - marquis 15y ago
    I know of two non-US versions that somehow manage the same thing with their local banking system: http://www.pozible.com.au http://www.pozible.com.au http://pledgeme.co.nz http://pledgeme.co.nz
- joelhaasnoot 15y ago
  Isn't Kickstarter sort of like an escrow service in that case? Not sure how that would work, but do know that here in the Netherlands most companies accepting payments on behalf of others (i.e payment providers), have some sort of trust/foundation that owns the company or holds the money.
- Fjolle 15y ago
  I'm pretty sure that i was forced to use amazon payments when Tim lured me into supporting that adventure game :)
- tylermenezes 15y ago
  Kickstarter doesn't use PayPal, actually.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    Huh, you're correct. I had this memory of having funded someone via Paypal, even could visualize the Paypal email confirmation, and I go and look, and it is indeed an Amazon Payments confirmation instead. Weird lapse of memory; sorry for the noise!
gm 15y ago
I don't buy it. I've done suspicious transaction monitoring for a very long time, and no, it's not that hard. Certainly not hard enough to prevent your CS people from even giving out a phone number to call for support. Most certainly not hard enough to not be able to address quickly. Financial transaction analysis is an old science. Experienced people are hard to find, but not exceedingly hard. Systems already exist to mine the hell out of data to tell the scammers apart form the genuine people. An of course, you can build your own system and whatever analysis you want. And how big do you have to be to be able to afford this? Not large at all. I think you overestimate the difficulty of catching bad guys. You should note that the recurring complaint is NOT "PayPal froze my funds". The complaint is "PayPal froze my funds and then refused to communicate at all with me". This points to incompetence and lack of consideration much more so than "This shit's hard, yo!" So, no, financial transaction analysis is not hard enough to screw over your customers.
- saurik 15y ago
  The notion that pre-orders are scary or generally disallowed has nothing to do with "scams": legitimate people just trying to get business done, who have established names or even good track records, don't always come through on these orders. It is not appropriate for those companies to be mitigating that risk using the credit from their merchant account; in this specific issue, PayPal can even get in trouble for allowing pre-orders to happen using their card providers. As for Regretsy's continual lack of ability to get CS from PayPal, as someone who has often spent egregious amounts of time talking to PayPal, I honestly think Regretsy is doing something wrong. I also personally feel like PayPal should just ban them from using the service: they don't seem to understand how online payments work, and their reaction to normal procedures is to raise a public shit storm... it's just lame, and it shouldn't be getting play on HN.
  - Klinky 15y ago
    As for Regretsy's continual lack of ability to get CS from PayPal, as someone who has often spent egregious amounts of time talking to PayPal, I honestly think Regretsy is doing something wrong. Customer service != fraud department. Google, Netflix & Paypal seem to have similar methods of dealing with "suspicious accounts". Those methods usually involve something along the lines of shutting the account down and then rebuffing attempts to communicate with the people who made the decision. Customer service evaporates once you've been ostracized by their security systems.
Karunamon 15y ago
Here's the problem. The problem is not that they're freezing accounts, its' the fact that there's no bloody CS to go along with it! They refuse to tell you why you're blocked. They refuse to allow you to talk to someone to appeal the decision. PayPal's CS is absolutely _horrible_. This magnifies any other issues you may have with them.
- Bud 15y ago
  No. It is ALSO a problem that they are freezing accounts. They shouldn't be doing that. It's not really Paypal's job to pretend to be policing fraud in this way. They have no business arbitrarily freezing accounts for months. None. It doesn't matter how much or how little customer support they have. That's wrong.
  - Karunamon 15y ago
    Every other payment processor does the same thing, dude. Especially when you go out of your way and violate the T&C (which as a practicing business, you have no excuse not to read and understand). If they say "You can't do X Y and Z" , where X is say, "Take payments for something that is greater than 20 days from shipping", and then you go ahead and do it anyways.. Welp. It's your own fault. Read the paperwork next time. The freezes would be reduced to an inconvenience instead of an all-hands emergency if they didn't go out of their way to avoid talking to you. I cannot fathom what kind of boneheaded moron decided that an automatic system flagging your account means you are now persona-non-grata.
    - Bud 15y ago
      Not sure why you are using the words "you" and "your". I'm not the OP and never had my PayPal frozen. I just think they are being unreasonable. :) Also not sure why that opinion is being downvoted, but hey. I reiterate: I don't care what their T&C says. It's not good business practice to freeze an account for months with no recourse. Period, paragraph.
      - philjr 15y ago
robomartin 15y ago
This isn't just a PayPal problem. All of the large Internet companies have this totalitarian approach to customer service. Google, Paypal, Ebay, etc. One bit goes from 0 to 1 somewhere in their code and you are friggin screwed. Can't talk to anyone. Can't email anyone. Can't SMS anyone. Can't even send smoke signals. It's a totalitarian hit-them-with-a-hammer approach that truly needs to end. I don't know what it will take for this to change but it has to change. For example, AdSense alone has left a trail of destruction like no other service out there. You read stories all the time about legitimate businesses being cutoff for no apparent reason without even the possibility to engage in dialog. This thing with PayPal is downright scary. Having done tens of thousands of dollars of business with PayPal its one of those things that can keep you up at night. The problem isn't the suspension of accounts for investigation. I welcome a responsible approach to preventing fraud at all levels, as a consumer and a vendor. No, the problem lies in the fact that they don't engage in any kind of mutually-constructive dialog in order to try to determine whether or not there's a real problem. By not doing so they can ruin people's lives and, because they have so much money, they don't really care because it causes them no pain at all. I for one hate government burrowing too deeply into anyone's affairs. However, this is one case where I find myself really hoping that one day we'll see Congressional action here in the US in order to protect us from the monsters that these huge corporations have become. Remember, vendors are customers too, not just the end-users/buyers of products and services. This, very plainly, is wrong and evil.
- Florin_Andrei 15y ago
  I totally agree. I can also see why you're being downvoted here. And that's why things are not changing.
  - robomartin 15y ago
    Well, the voting system in HN is friggin broken. It's too easy for fan-boys to push you down and out of a conversation. I've experienced this many times. It's sad only because these are generally good discussions. However, if you don't tow the "company line", if you will, you'll get punished with down-votes. All this promotes is a uniform culture of fan boys or, what is worst, an audience that does not participate due to the futility of it all. Down-vote away. It'd be easy to implement a set of rules that could make it fair. For example, limit the rate of change on any given post so that it can't be attacked by a barrage of down votes by fan boys. This would open up a post to a wider non-ideological audience and allow it to float or sink on its merits rather than whether or not the author pandered to the fan-boy culture's point of view on all fronts. Further to that, nobody should be allowed to down-vote silently. That's chicken-shit. If you down-vote you need to state why you are doing so and subject your view to the same peer review, if you will. Another interesting idea is that down-voting costs you a significant amount of karma points. And, if you go below a certain number you are ejected from HN. Now people are likely to think twice before down-voting on ideological basis because they'll stand to loose something. All said, HN is still tolerable but it really is frustrating to be down-voted when purely on ideological basis rather than on based on the merit, accuracy or veracity of a post. Anyhow, the PayPal, Google, eBay, etc. problem is not likely to be solved by yelling and screaming on blogs and HN. I firmly believe that massive legal action, and, more than likely, in the US, Congressional action, is the only light at the end of the tunnel. They are too big and just can't be hurt or bothered with any other approach.
ktizo 15y ago
I thought I'd have a very quick look at the claim that PayPal is particularly small compared to credit card companies. PayPal is a direct subsidiary of Ebay Inc. which has around 11 billion dollars in revenue, so compared to American Express, which has 29 billion in revenue, it is smaller but in the same sort of ballpark. You know, despite their tiny size, I think they might just about have the available funds and resources to work out fairly quickly if a book for a known cancer charity featuring popular authors is likely to be fraudulent or not. And to provide proper arbitration.
lhnn 15y ago
I still don't understand where it's Paypal's place to do fraud investigations. What happened to Buyer Beware? Let people spend their money how they want, be it scam or not. The only monitoring Paypal should do is that accounts aren't getting hacked.
- adgar 15y ago
  Paypal integrates with existing (non-Paypal-run) bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards, and more, and they have to work within the requirements of the integrated financial products, and those products all have fraud-related rules/clauses/legal stuff I don't understand. Paypal has to minimize their liability toward all the other financial institutions they work with. I sincerely doubt Paypal would be able to work with all those other businesses if their stated policy was to just pretend fraud didn't exist.
- DanBC 15y ago
  Even if we accept that Paypal has no place in protecting people from fraud, it's hard to accept that paypal should not try to protect themselves from fraud. Consider that criminal gangs are huge multi-million dollar businesses that run complex scams and money routing tricks that can confuse governments[1] it's not surprising that PayPal wants to try to protect itself. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5204422.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5204422.stm)
- smackfu 15y ago
  Some customer tells their bank "this charge from Paypal is fraudulent" or "this charge from Paypal is for an item that was never delivered". The bank says to Paypal "prove this is a valid charge or we will take the money back." How does Paypal not have to do fraud investigations in that case?
trin_ 15y ago
why dont all these pre-order things sell coupon codes for the actual product? "Buy a Product X Code NOW for 19,99* *product may not ship til dd/mm/yy". wouldnt that solve the problem?
- Karunamon 15y ago
  No, because then if the original product falls through, there's still going to be a metric ton of chargebacks.
ahoyhere 15y ago
PayPal has horrendous customer service even compared to the worst credit card processor. For example, if you have somebody dispute a charge with a CC processor, you have a chance to refute. Not so much with PayPal. In fact, they might order the allegedly scammed buyer to simply destroy the thing you sold them instead of letting you refund the money and take it as a return: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57352136-501465/paypal-makes-ebay-customer-destroy-$2500-violin-seller-left-empty-handed/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57352136-501465/paypa... Here's something else. When we were planning on setting up PayPal payments to integrate with our app, we went thru the process blah de blah, upgraded our account to Web Payments Pro III or whatever, and suddenly… we weren't able to access our money any more. They decided to hold 30% of all our revenue for 90 days. Forever. Not just via this new mechanism. But every dollar that passed through our account. This was after years and years of happily using PayPal and having hundreds of thousands of dollars pass through the account without incident or customer complaint. Meanwhile when we were a brand new LLC without a credit record to our name, we had no problem getting set up with real "big boy" credit card processing, merchant account, etc., all of which deposits daily. No 30-day holds. More importantly, if there ever were an issue, these companies have clear, firm policies, and great phone support. I loathe Auth.net for all kinds of reasons, but if you call them, they actually help you. There's none of this "No, I cannot discuss it, and no, you cannot talk to anyone else" crap that PayPal loooooves to pull. So, while PayPal would like you to think that they actually offer better service, that their hands are tied, that it's somehow not due to them being total capricious assholes… that's just one big stinking lie.

Uchikoma 15y ago

Yes, see the debable with the JooJoo successor tablet where preorders were not fulfilled.

saurik 15y ago

Going even further, it is the stated position of most credit card companies that at the time of purchase you are only allowed to take out an "authorization" (hold) on the funds: you cannot "capture" (get) the money until you are pretty much just about to (within 24-48 hours) ship the product.

tokenadult 15y ago
you cannot "capture" (get) the money until you are pretty much just about to (within 24-48 hours) ship the product. I'm not sure what the general worldwide fact is for all kinds of payment processing. But it is general practice (not federal law, as I thought before editing this) in the United States that a seller can't actually get money from a transaction paid by a credit card unless the item ordered has actually entered the shipment process. http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre28.shtm http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre28.shtm That's the way Amazon has always billed me, and I think it's the reason that Amazon sends me partial shipments even when I didn't ask for separate shipments when I order several items at once.
- cperciva 15y ago
  I think it's the reason that Amazon sends me partial shipments even when I didn't ask for separate shipments when I order several items at once. That might be one of the reasons, but I'm sure the usual reason is that the items are coming from different warehouses and the logistics are easier (/cheaper) for each to ship to you directly than for them to shuffle their product around so they can send everything to you in one box.
- pja 15y ago
  Same in the UK: You cannot (legally) charge someone for a product ordered over the internet until you have shipped it under the distance-selling regulations.

_delirium 15y ago

Kickstarter seems to have interestingly set itself up as a workable intermediary for that: you can set up a Kickstarter that is basically a glorified way of taking preorders, people can pay for them via Paypal, and generally Paypal doesn't cause trouble in those cases.

ticks 15y ago
Kickstarter is US-only for project creators, so it's not really an option for most people.
- marquis 15y ago
  I know of two non-US versions that somehow manage the same thing with their local banking system: http://www.pozible.com.au http://www.pozible.com.au http://pledgeme.co.nz http://pledgeme.co.nz
joelhaasnoot 15y ago
Isn't Kickstarter sort of like an escrow service in that case? Not sure how that would work, but do know that here in the Netherlands most companies accepting payments on behalf of others (i.e payment providers), have some sort of trust/foundation that owns the company or holds the money.
Fjolle 15y ago
I'm pretty sure that i was forced to use amazon payments when Tim lured me into supporting that adventure game :)
tylermenezes 15y ago
Kickstarter doesn't use PayPal, actually.
- _delirium 15y ago
  Huh, you're correct. I had this memory of having funded someone via Paypal, even could visualize the Paypal email confirmation, and I go and look, and it is indeed an Amazon Payments confirmation instead. Weird lapse of memory; sorry for the noise!

gm 15y ago

I don't buy it. I've done suspicious transaction monitoring for a very long time, and no, it's not that hard. Certainly not hard enough to prevent your CS people from even giving out a phone number to call for support. Most certainly not hard enough to not be able to address quickly. Financial transaction analysis is an old science. Experienced people are hard to find, but not exceedingly hard. Systems already exist to mine the hell out of data to tell the scammers apart form the genuine people. An of course, you can build your own system and whatever analysis you want. And how big do you have to be to be able to afford this? Not large at all. I think you overestimate the difficulty of catching bad guys. You should note that the recurring complaint is NOT "PayPal froze my funds". The complaint is "PayPal froze my funds and then refused to communicate at all with me". This points to incompetence and lack of consideration much more so than "This shit's hard, yo!" So, no, financial transaction analysis is not hard enough to screw over your customers.

saurik 15y ago
The notion that pre-orders are scary or generally disallowed has nothing to do with "scams": legitimate people just trying to get business done, who have established names or even good track records, don't always come through on these orders. It is not appropriate for those companies to be mitigating that risk using the credit from their merchant account; in this specific issue, PayPal can even get in trouble for allowing pre-orders to happen using their card providers. As for Regretsy's continual lack of ability to get CS from PayPal, as someone who has often spent egregious amounts of time talking to PayPal, I honestly think Regretsy is doing something wrong. I also personally feel like PayPal should just ban them from using the service: they don't seem to understand how online payments work, and their reaction to normal procedures is to raise a public shit storm... it's just lame, and it shouldn't be getting play on HN.
- Klinky 15y ago
  As for Regretsy's continual lack of ability to get CS from PayPal, as someone who has often spent egregious amounts of time talking to PayPal, I honestly think Regretsy is doing something wrong. Customer service != fraud department. Google, Netflix & Paypal seem to have similar methods of dealing with "suspicious accounts". Those methods usually involve something along the lines of shutting the account down and then rebuffing attempts to communicate with the people who made the decision. Customer service evaporates once you've been ostracized by their security systems.

Karunamon 15y ago

Here's the problem. The problem is not that they're freezing accounts, its' the fact that there's no bloody CS to go along with it! They refuse to tell you why you're blocked. They refuse to allow you to talk to someone to appeal the decision. PayPal's CS is absolutely _horrible_. This magnifies any other issues you may have with them.

Bud 15y ago
No. It is ALSO a problem that they are freezing accounts. They shouldn't be doing that. It's not really Paypal's job to pretend to be policing fraud in this way. They have no business arbitrarily freezing accounts for months. None. It doesn't matter how much or how little customer support they have. That's wrong.
- Karunamon 15y ago
  Every other payment processor does the same thing, dude. Especially when you go out of your way and violate the T&C (which as a practicing business, you have no excuse not to read and understand). If they say "You can't do X Y and Z" , where X is say, "Take payments for something that is greater than 20 days from shipping", and then you go ahead and do it anyways.. Welp. It's your own fault. Read the paperwork next time. The freezes would be reduced to an inconvenience instead of an all-hands emergency if they didn't go out of their way to avoid talking to you. I cannot fathom what kind of boneheaded moron decided that an automatic system flagging your account means you are now persona-non-grata.
  - Bud 15y ago
    Not sure why you are using the words "you" and "your". I'm not the OP and never had my PayPal frozen. I just think they are being unreasonable. :) Also not sure why that opinion is being downvoted, but hey. I reiterate: I don't care what their T&C says. It's not good business practice to freeze an account for months with no recourse. Period, paragraph.
    - philjr 15y ago

robomartin 15y ago

This isn't just a PayPal problem. All of the large Internet companies have this totalitarian approach to customer service. Google, Paypal, Ebay, etc. One bit goes from 0 to 1 somewhere in their code and you are friggin screwed. Can't talk to anyone. Can't email anyone. Can't SMS anyone. Can't even send smoke signals. It's a totalitarian hit-them-with-a-hammer approach that truly needs to end. I don't know what it will take for this to change but it has to change. For example, AdSense alone has left a trail of destruction like no other service out there. You read stories all the time about legitimate businesses being cutoff for no apparent reason without even the possibility to engage in dialog. This thing with PayPal is downright scary. Having done tens of thousands of dollars of business with PayPal its one of those things that can keep you up at night. The problem isn't the suspension of accounts for investigation. I welcome a responsible approach to preventing fraud at all levels, as a consumer and a vendor. No, the problem lies in the fact that they don't engage in any kind of mutually-constructive dialog in order to try to determine whether or not there's a real problem. By not doing so they can ruin people's lives and, because they have so much money, they don't really care because it causes them no pain at all. I for one hate government burrowing too deeply into anyone's affairs. However, this is one case where I find myself really hoping that one day we'll see Congressional action here in the US in order to protect us from the monsters that these huge corporations have become. Remember, vendors are customers too, not just the end-users/buyers of products and services. This, very plainly, is wrong and evil.

Florin_Andrei 15y ago
I totally agree. I can also see why you're being downvoted here. And that's why things are not changing.
- robomartin 15y ago
  Well, the voting system in HN is friggin broken. It's too easy for fan-boys to push you down and out of a conversation. I've experienced this many times. It's sad only because these are generally good discussions. However, if you don't tow the "company line", if you will, you'll get punished with down-votes. All this promotes is a uniform culture of fan boys or, what is worst, an audience that does not participate due to the futility of it all. Down-vote away. It'd be easy to implement a set of rules that could make it fair. For example, limit the rate of change on any given post so that it can't be attacked by a barrage of down votes by fan boys. This would open up a post to a wider non-ideological audience and allow it to float or sink on its merits rather than whether or not the author pandered to the fan-boy culture's point of view on all fronts. Further to that, nobody should be allowed to down-vote silently. That's chicken-shit. If you down-vote you need to state why you are doing so and subject your view to the same peer review, if you will. Another interesting idea is that down-voting costs you a significant amount of karma points. And, if you go below a certain number you are ejected from HN. Now people are likely to think twice before down-voting on ideological basis because they'll stand to loose something. All said, HN is still tolerable but it really is frustrating to be down-voted when purely on ideological basis rather than on based on the merit, accuracy or veracity of a post. Anyhow, the PayPal, Google, eBay, etc. problem is not likely to be solved by yelling and screaming on blogs and HN. I firmly believe that massive legal action, and, more than likely, in the US, Congressional action, is the only light at the end of the tunnel. They are too big and just can't be hurt or bothered with any other approach.

ktizo 15y ago

I thought I'd have a very quick look at the claim that PayPal is particularly small compared to credit card companies. PayPal is a direct subsidiary of Ebay Inc. which has around 11 billion dollars in revenue, so compared to American Express, which has 29 billion in revenue, it is smaller but in the same sort of ballpark. You know, despite their tiny size, I think they might just about have the available funds and resources to work out fairly quickly if a book for a known cancer charity featuring popular authors is likely to be fraudulent or not. And to provide proper arbitration.

lhnn 15y ago

I still don't understand where it's Paypal's place to do fraud investigations. What happened to Buyer Beware? Let people spend their money how they want, be it scam or not. The only monitoring Paypal should do is that accounts aren't getting hacked.

adgar 15y ago
Paypal integrates with existing (non-Paypal-run) bank accounts, debit cards, credit cards, and more, and they have to work within the requirements of the integrated financial products, and those products all have fraud-related rules/clauses/legal stuff I don't understand. Paypal has to minimize their liability toward all the other financial institutions they work with. I sincerely doubt Paypal would be able to work with all those other businesses if their stated policy was to just pretend fraud didn't exist.
DanBC 15y ago
Even if we accept that Paypal has no place in protecting people from fraud, it's hard to accept that paypal should not try to protect themselves from fraud. Consider that criminal gangs are huge multi-million dollar businesses that run complex scams and money routing tricks that can confuse governments[1] it's not surprising that PayPal wants to try to protect itself. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5204422.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5204422.stm)
smackfu 15y ago
Some customer tells their bank "this charge from Paypal is fraudulent" or "this charge from Paypal is for an item that was never delivered". The bank says to Paypal "prove this is a valid charge or we will take the money back." How does Paypal not have to do fraud investigations in that case?

trin_ 15y ago

why dont all these pre-order things sell coupon codes for the actual product? "Buy a Product X Code NOW for 19,99* *product may not ship til dd/mm/yy". wouldnt that solve the problem?

Karunamon 15y ago
No, because then if the original product falls through, there's still going to be a metric ton of chargebacks.

ahoyhere 15y ago

PayPal has horrendous customer service even compared to the worst credit card processor. For example, if you have somebody dispute a charge with a CC processor, you have a chance to refute. Not so much with PayPal. In fact, they might order the allegedly scammed buyer to simply destroy the thing you sold them instead of letting you refund the money and take it as a return: http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57352136-501465/paypal-makes-ebay-customer-destroy-$2500-violin-seller-left-empty-handed/ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-501465_162-57352136-501465/paypa... Here's something else. When we were planning on setting up PayPal payments to integrate with our app, we went thru the process blah de blah, upgraded our account to Web Payments Pro III or whatever, and suddenly… we weren't able to access our money any more. They decided to hold 30% of all our revenue for 90 days. Forever. Not just via this new mechanism. But every dollar that passed through our account. This was after years and years of happily using PayPal and having hundreds of thousands of dollars pass through the account without incident or customer complaint. Meanwhile when we were a brand new LLC without a credit record to our name, we had no problem getting set up with real "big boy" credit card processing, merchant account, etc., all of which deposits daily. No 30-day holds. More importantly, if there ever were an issue, these companies have clear, firm policies, and great phone support. I loathe Auth.net for all kinds of reasons, but if you call them, they actually help you. There's none of this "No, I cannot discuss it, and no, you cannot talk to anyone else" crap that PayPal loooooves to pull. So, while PayPal would like you to think that they actually offer better service, that their hands are tied, that it's somehow not due to them being total capricious assholes… that's just one big stinking lie.