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PayPal CEO writes personal response

619 points by Peteris 14y ago

petercooper 14y ago
If even a modicum of this attitude can seep down into all of the customer facing departments at PayPal, it'd be an awesome thing. I hope they pull it off.
- akcreek 14y ago
  Agreed. I hope the policy and attitude can change. I do a lot of business with PayPal because my customers prefer it. Certainly not because they have provided much value other than being the most commonly used service.
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  Actually it would be 'life saving'. One of the reasons the payments space is flourishing is because PayPal has been a poor service provider (creating pain). And it has to come from the top, and you have to look into success metrics carefully to insure the folks in your organization aren't doing more harm than good to get 'good' ones.
mmanfrin 14y ago
Context?
- dchest 14y ago
  http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483710 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483710 http://allthingsd.com/20120907/paypals-new-president-faces-the-music-if-we-suck-we-now-face-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20120907/paypals-new-president-faces-t...
- clamprecht 14y ago
  PayPal has earned their reputation for freezing accounts - WePay even used it as a marketing tactic: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/
dkulchenko 14y ago
Here's the context for those curious: http://storify.com/goodonpaper/how-twitter-rescued-me-from-paypal-hell http://storify.com/goodonpaper/how-twitter-rescued-me-from-p...
antonioevans 14y ago
I hope this is a view of the transparency we'll be seeing in the future from all levels of the org.
heeton 14y ago
That kind of behaviour from a CEO is not seen enough. Good on him!
njloof 14y ago
Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.
- rhizome 14y ago
  PayPal is second only to the TSA in reflecting the futility of asking for such things.
- wpietri 14y ago
  I agree that they should always try to give you a reason. But that's not as easy as it sounds. Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere. It's a hard problem. PayPal solved it the wrong way, but they'll never get to full transparency.
  - Karunamon 14y ago
    >it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere. Couldn't you say make the same argument of proprietary vs open source software?
    - eli 14y ago
      Yes. Does that make it untrue?
      - Karunamon 14y ago
        Not at all, but wouldn't the benefits outweigh the risks? Security by obscurity really isn't security at all.
tlack 14y ago
Great email.. one of the most convincing and sincere high level apologies I've read. Perhaps, for once, the future is looking bright for Paypal. I could have done without the "forwarded from my iPad" at the bottom though.
- SerpentJoe 14y ago
  For what it's worth there are no occurrences of "sorry" or "apologize" in that letter.
notatoad 14y ago
So bloggers with enough pull to get the CEO's attention will no longer have their funds stolen by PayPal. Now how about the rest of us?
- rm999 14y ago
  I realize you are being cynical, but the e-mail says the CEO wants to make radical changes to fix issues for all customers. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but if we take him for his word this isn't just for a subset of users.
  - protomyth 14y ago
    I think notatoad is being realistic. People with large audiences get things fixed, they get the resources, and the rest of use get ignored. No one will write an article about notatoad or protomyth getting hosed. I hope Paypal can get it together, but I live in fear of getting hosed by them without any recourse.
  - notatoad 14y ago
    I'll admit that it's better than PayPal's previous customer service policy of "fuck all y'all", but I'm not changing my opinion of the company based on one email from a CEO in full damage control mode.
runako 14y ago
Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account). It's good that this executive (President, not the CEO as indicated in the title) is taking initiative to fix things at PayPal. But until things are fixed, PayPal is still a business risk.
- jseliger 14y ago
  Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account). True, but as you note in the second paragraph, this is still a major improvement. I stopped using Paypal a long time ago because of an utterly typical story: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-links-paypals-bogusness-ribbed-tees-literary-friendships-literary-research-alex-tabarroks-new-book-and-more/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-link... and have been encouraging other people not to use Paypal ever since. It's almost impossible for Paypal to be worse than it is, and it might even get better.
skennedy 14y ago
Why now? Why this situation is it finally hitting home? What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.
- comex 14y ago
  The email mentions that this CEO took over only five months ago.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
Why now? Why with this story? I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service). Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?
- sync 14y ago
  It says right there: "I'm driving a lot of changes at PayPal (I took over 5 months ago)"
  - wging 14y ago
    But 5 months is a long time. Why only now? Surely there have been high-profile cases whose media frenzies can be capitalized on before now.
    - asarazan 14y ago
      I think you're both underestimating how long it takes to really get settled in and take charge of a huge corporation, as well as overestimating just how long 5 months really is. Seems like about the right amount of time for him to start really kicking things into high gear imo.
    - joshAg 14y ago
      If I had to guess, I'd say because it took the ceo a few months to see how things are currently done and identify problems. The rest of the time I guess would be waiting for the right case to come along.
    - j79 14y ago
      Five months may seem like a long time, but trying to fix something that's pretty broken probably requires a bit of time to understand just what the hell you're trying to fix.
    - diego 14y ago
switch007 14y ago
Media storm brews, someone high up responds and resolves issue. Nothing new. It'd have been news if a random support person did the right thing.
j2kun 14y ago
"Sent from my iPad." Nice.
- gcb 14y ago
  Yeah. He promises to move mountains, but couldn't sit in front of his computer. Or if he routinely works from his ipad, and still have that as a signature, I'd be very doubtful of his capabilities.
appleflaxen 14y ago
It's fantastic to see PayPal finally paying attention to these kinds of nightmare stories, but it's hard to believe it has anything to do with altruism. They are seeing Stripe, Square, etc getting way more mindshare, and they are scared. With all due respect PayPal, good riddance. You've sucked too hard for too long, and now we finally have alternatives.
mcherm 14y ago
Here is what I would do... I would take him up on his offer (personal attention from the CEO? Sure!), but I would ask him whether he'd be willing to pick 3 or 4 other customers who had _NOT_ written an article which had gone viral and offer THEM the same deal. I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.
- maratd 14y ago
  Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere. This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter". Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
  - wpietri 14y ago
    How do you think a mechanism like that gets created? Do it in one go and you're talking a department of tens or hundreds of people, most of them newly hired. Turn them loose without careful thought and at the very least you create massive chaos in your organization. But you also probably create substantial losses as fraudsters use the chaos to take a lot of money. I think the only way you can get to the customer service experience you want is by starting with one customer's problems, solving them, and then changing the organization a bit so it's less dumb. Then you rinse and repeat for years. It's an organization of thousands of people across the globe, with a zillion lines of code and, a ton of procedures and habits, and a lot of institutional inertia. The way to solve it is by starting now in a manageable way, and that's what he claims he's doing.
    - jaylevitt 14y ago
coryl 14y ago
Perhaps one of the reasons PayPal is being more service conscious is they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square. I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.
- rishonik 14y ago
  > they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square And bitcoin. No matter how PayPal tries to put the kibosh on selling PayPal for bitcoin, people will still find a way around it. I no longer use PayPal after their first and only abuse of my account. They had one chance and I found better solutions. That the CEO is sending out emails to high PR value customers is a very telling move.
deleted 14y ago
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philhippus 14y ago
Credit where it's due: out of all the hundreds of Paypal horror stories, this is the first time I have ever seen a reasonable, let alone personable, response come from that nebulous digital beast. Fair play to the new CEO, he has won back one notch of respect and hopefully averted the slow motion train wreck that had probably already started at Paypal.
webjunkie 14y ago
Wow, just wow. If it's real. If he really means it. But still.
rhizome 14y ago
Talk is cheap, PayPal.
keithvan 14y ago
Why does it take a story to make it to front page Hacker News to get attention, to get a "direct channel" to the executives when things go wrong? It ignores the all the horrible complaints and stories from everybody else. It's inequity in itself when the only way you will get attention from big companies is from making posts on Hacker News. Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?
noonespecial 14y ago
This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise. The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.
- rhizome 14y ago
  The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none." This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
  - yuhong 14y ago
    Even the email says that this is only the first step.
    - rhizome 14y ago
      Which leaves us only to assume there will be a second step.
      - dlikhten 14y ago
        I am always wiery of these maneuvers because they can swing both ways. I must say, good for the CEO to response; smart man who realizes the company is going to get hit, hard, and soon. The only question left is: to trust or not to trust? Let's see if PP makes any official announcements on policy to combat this.
Apocryphon 14y ago
I've always wanted to have a spreadsheet or something to keep track of the "HN effect" in which companies respond to public outrages because of their publication here. Though of course they might also get attention from Reddit and other online outlets as well.
a-priori 14y ago
PayPal is starting to feel the pressure of all these new payment startups (eg. Square, Stripe) springing up around them. They know that if they're not careful with their brand image they're going to quickly lose their lunch in the next few years.
robbeezy 14y ago
The most effective way to show displeasure with a business is to stop being a customer. Period. You can't blame the CEO here - he's simply trying to stop the bleeding before Hacker News reopens it with a machete. I've briefly worked for a payment processor - and I'm not overstating here - but this industry doesn't give 1/2 a st about your feelings of them, their customer service, or what you think of their CEOs. They only care about getting as much money as possible. Period. Peteris, keep posting of your experience and let's see if the CEO follows through. If he doesn't he'll lose twice as much respect and twice as many customers. If he does, then know you got some very expensive customer service, my friend.
redm 14y ago
One wronged customer down; thousands more, including myself, to go.
ck2 14y ago
Now he needs to write the other 100k innocent people PayPal has completely screwed with.
dmbaggett 14y ago
From the skepticism here, it's clear Mr. Marcus has his work cut out for him. Even with far fewer people ever reporting to me (directly and indirectly) than him, I sympathize with his inability to get the unvarnished truth from his own people. "We're routinely screwing people out of hard cash" is probably a scary message to relay up. His email sounded sincere, and he's new to the job. I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must know that the technorati hating his company is bad for business.
- rhizome 14y ago
  It's not hard to make an email sound sincere, especially when vetted by a PR agency.
  - lancewiggs 14y ago
    I suspect no PR involved here - that email is repetitive, not polished, and feels like a new CEO trying to do the right thing and light a fire.
    - ivanstojic 14y ago
      In this case, I'd suspect that lighting the fire should be the first step to burning most of the customer relations department. I'll trust Paypal when I feel the smell of burning corpses from their offices.
      - protomyth 14y ago
        I would rather they fire anyone who thinks the profit they have made off interest from frozen accounts is a good thing. It is just as despicable as car companies making money off their service center. I would really like them to make a policy change that any money collected in interest off frozen accounts is given to the account holder after the freeze.
        pbreit 14y ago
d0m 14y ago
Seriously, fuck them. They're starting to act like they care because there are new competitors who've shown how it's supposed to be done. Sorry but not for me, Stripe is my new paypal.
SquareWave 14y ago
Dear Andy , After the many years of Paypal receiving stories just like yours I'm forced to take action. The traditional Paypal long term strategy of "Hahaha, where else are you going to go for online payments?" is not a viable option anymore. It's unfortunate that your story has spread so far and so quickly. I now have to figure out how to resolve this AND try to figure out how anyone let it get this bad. Changing such entreched culture here is going to be hard. I'm going to do my best of not letting Paypal become more of a cliche of how big businesses get their foundations kicked out from under them by smaller, scarappy startups. P.S. Please,please, please don't google Stripe.
catfish 14y ago
A single email does not change a process nor a corporate culture of indifference.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
angryasian 14y ago
The level of discourse on HN lately is absurd. Here is a new CEO that appears to be looking to change things for the positive, yet everyone wants to be cynical and doubting. Yet when startups have major f* ups, the conversation is much different. Lets all admit change is slow and that paypal is still one of the more trusted payment solutions accepted globally. It would be nice to be able to use them in the future with some continued reliability.
- pygorex 14y ago
  The skepticism about PayPal is well founded. PayPal has rightfully earned a reputation of imposing arbitrary decisions on account holders. Maybe if PayPal was more transparent and actually provided some semblance of customer service their decisions would appear more fair. While its nice that the CEO has personally responded this actually shows a far greater dysfunction. Why should it take escalating all the way up to the CEO level to get someone at PayPal to listen and advocate for the customers position? The contrast with startups is misleading. PayPal has been in business for a long time and is a billion dollar company. They have the resources to stop making stupid mistakes, but still persist in their bad behavior. They can get away with this because they've cornered a large part of the online payments marketplace. Sure, a startup is going to make mistakes. And they're expected to. That's all a startup is really - a machine that generates mistakes in an attempt to find (or build) a profitable market.
  - angryasian 14y ago
    Yes did you miss the part that they brought in a new CEO to bring change. Lets just blame everything thats happened in the past on a guy who wasn't even on the job. Blaming mistakes on lack of resources is a little naive.
- teaneedz 14y ago
  Well put ... PayPal has some housecleaning to do but here is someone that appears to be listening ... listening in a big way. I give PayPal credit for this response. Rather than being cynical, I'm happier giving credit to someone who wants to make things better. Mr. Marcus - some of us appreciate your efforts here.
geuis 14y ago
To everyone, on both sides, that feel this is just a stunt or a sign of real change, just give it time. Either things get better at Paypal, or they don't. Yes, big lumbering companies can change for the better. Microsoft, IBM, and Apple come to mind. Yahoo may be on that road now too. But it takes time to see. The wheels of change move slowly.
propercoil 14y ago
In the previous post David replied to the comment (on HN) i made about wanting to change paypal's generic template to increase sales through a/b testing.I had a rant about paypal's api suckness and i also ranted about how draconian the fund freezes of diaspora and wikileaks were. He said that he understands and told me to send him an email and we will take care of it. No email was sent yet as i'm afraid i'll be targeted in the future. I can't put my legitimate digital business at that risk - there are tonnage upon tonnage of forum threads over the web of people's business going under because of pp freezes only because they contacted paypal it's heart breaking and too much of a red flag to me. The only thing i can say about David is that he looks and sounds like a genuine guy who replied and started a discussion with the community and that as we all know goes a long way. So maybe his intentions are good but will paypal have zappos's culture regarding merchants all of a sudden? i doubt it and you all doubt it too because what matters is implementation ie real life.
lyime 14y ago
Legit.
DigitalSea 14y ago
While the CEO has only been onboard for 5 months now, these kind of issues plaguing Paypal have been there for years now. I remember a good friend of mine had his Paypal account frozen a few years back because they thought it was suspicious he had received money so quickly (he was selling a popular marketing eBook). After making him jump through hoops to get his money (identification, financial records and scans of his passport, etc) he finally received the cash 7 months later, by that stage he was ruined emotionally and financially due to the fact it was his living (he couldn't pay bills or anything). While I applaud the new CEO wants to make amends, for some like my friend who relied on Paypal to make a living by processing his business payments it's a little too late. Although Paypal is still the industry leader (because they have a stranglehold on online payments) the new CEO knows that offerings like Stripe and whatnot are making Paypal less and less relevant each and every day. I would love to see Paypal change, the first thing they need to do is fire all of their customer service staff and train new staff with a new set of guidelines, implement a clean-cut way of contacting Paypal if something goes wrong and clean their act up.
emilysviolins 14y ago
I hate hate hate PayPal. They ruined my ebay business!
dzhiurgis 14y ago
Link is down. Mirror / backup anyone?
j45 14y ago
The day Paypal blinked? I just was sent my first Paypal survey that I can ever remember about what else I'm using or wanting to use
ydvj 14y ago
his name is david marcus. isn't this the same guy who cheated and used protomatter in Project Genesis?
- zaidmo 14y ago
  And his mum is Carol Marcus? Kirk's son!
lobster45 14y ago
Back in 2006 someone hacked my paypal account and used my credit card that was attached to paypal to purchase a few ipods. The criminal had them sent to their home address. They also changed my paypal password so I was not able to login. I contacted paypal support and they were absolutely not willing to help even. It was terrible customer service. I have never used paypal since.
macarthy12 14y ago
I think this represents a stay of execution for PayPal. I bashed them in the past, but maybe there is some hope.
ars 14y ago
The CEO also posted a reply to the original story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485627 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485627 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidmarcus http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidmarcus
hollerith 14y ago
Posting screenshots of text instead of text make me sad. It excludes visually-challenged people from this discussion, makes old people get out their glasses and squint, and makes cutting and pasting impossible.
- RobotCaleb 14y ago
  Not to mention random emails about stuff with no attached context.
lordastral 14y ago
Okay which one of you hacked the Paypal CEO's account?
jongraehl 14y ago
What the CEO is doing is effective. He's signaling that he really wants to fix things and won't make excuses. I doubt the CEO will learn much he didn't already know by a "direct line" case study, but humbling himself in this way might give him the lever he needs to really move company culture. PayPal can keep most of its anti-fraud effectiveness while improving customer service for those innocents who want to recover from misclassification. Either being more trusting, or spending more effort discerning who can be trusted, will cost them money short term. But if they don't do it, they'll lose some of their customers to competitors who will.
miffydiffy 14y ago
Screenshots are more confident than copy&paste of text.
marginalboy 14y ago
That's classy.
perlgeek 14y ago
To all the naysayers out there: in your opinion, what could the CEO have written to convince you? He doesn't have the option to go back in time to change what happened, only to respond. If I'd receive such an email, I'd give 'em a second chance.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  I wonder if they cleared thir backlog of 100,000 complaints from 2002? [1] Seriously, PayPal has had the same atrocious customer service now for well over a decade now, one email from a new CEO means exactly nothing in the grand scheme of things. 1. http://pub.bna.com/eclr/021227.htm http://pub.bna.com/eclr/021227.htm
niketdesai 14y ago
I think we should make judgement on the outcome rather than the email (since it's basically speculation anyways). Judge: Do these types of problems happen in the same amount and severity in 6 months? (or whatever time horizon you think is agreeable to see significant progress). And there shouldn't be mockery for him fixing one account. Sure there are many to go, but before this account was in the same boat...so it's an improvement no matter how small. Whatever Andy said in his post really resonated to D. Marcus; now I hope it really is the catalyst for PayPal to improve. edited shortened it up.
tsieling 14y ago
Nice gesture, but how many people are going to have the same reach in their complaints? It would be nitpicking to say the email fails the corporate sociopath-speak test with 'leverage the issues', but what irks me is asking for the help of someone your company has just offended. The frame of mind of a non-sociopath would be to say 'how can I help earn back your trust?'. I've given up on PayPal for my meagre needs, but anyone with real money on the line should beat a path from them until their actions truly speak louder than their words. Speaking of words, I noticed a TOS update from them but haven't read it yet, so if they have taken positive steps then add grains of salt to this comment, to taste.
treskot 14y ago
Reminds me of the proverb "do good nd cast into the river". If you want the world to know about it I would simply consider it a PR stunt. Maybe the Paypal CEO had a positive intent and the Marketing team / PR team wanted to brag about it to the entire world. That's how the corporate world is though!

619 points by Peteris 14y ago

If even a modicum of this attitude can seep down into all of the customer facing departments at PayPal, it'd be an awesome thing. I hope they pull it off.

akcreek 14y ago
Agreed. I hope the policy and attitude can change. I do a lot of business with PayPal because my customers prefer it. Certainly not because they have provided much value other than being the most commonly used service.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Actually it would be 'life saving'. One of the reasons the payments space is flourishing is because PayPal has been a poor service provider (creating pain). And it has to come from the top, and you have to look into success metrics carefully to insure the folks in your organization aren't doing more harm than good to get 'good' ones.

mmanfrin 14y ago

Context?

dchest 14y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483710 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4483710 http://allthingsd.com/20120907/paypals-new-president-faces-the-music-if-we-suck-we-now-face-it/ http://allthingsd.com/20120907/paypals-new-president-faces-t...
clamprecht 14y ago
PayPal has earned their reputation for freezing accounts - WePay even used it as a marketing tactic: http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/26/wepay-ice-paypal/

dkulchenko 14y ago

Here's the context for those curious: http://storify.com/goodonpaper/how-twitter-rescued-me-from-paypal-hell http://storify.com/goodonpaper/how-twitter-rescued-me-from-p...

antonioevans 14y ago

I hope this is a view of the transparency we'll be seeing in the future from all levels of the org.

heeton 14y ago

That kind of behaviour from a CEO is not seen enough. Good on him!

njloof 14y ago

Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.

rhizome 14y ago
PayPal is second only to the TSA in reflecting the futility of asking for such things.
wpietri 14y ago
I agree that they should always try to give you a reason. But that's not as easy as it sounds. Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere. It's a hard problem. PayPal solved it the wrong way, but they'll never get to full transparency.
- Karunamon 14y ago
  >it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere. Couldn't you say make the same argument of proprietary vs open source software?
  - eli 14y ago
    Yes. Does that make it untrue?
    - Karunamon 14y ago
      Not at all, but wouldn't the benefits outweigh the risks? Security by obscurity really isn't security at all.

tlack 14y ago

Great email.. one of the most convincing and sincere high level apologies I've read. Perhaps, for once, the future is looking bright for Paypal. I could have done without the "forwarded from my iPad" at the bottom though.

SerpentJoe 14y ago
For what it's worth there are no occurrences of "sorry" or "apologize" in that letter.

notatoad 14y ago

So bloggers with enough pull to get the CEO's attention will no longer have their funds stolen by PayPal. Now how about the rest of us?

rm999 14y ago
I realize you are being cynical, but the e-mail says the CEO wants to make radical changes to fix issues for all customers. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but if we take him for his word this isn't just for a subset of users.
- protomyth 14y ago
  I think notatoad is being realistic. People with large audiences get things fixed, they get the resources, and the rest of use get ignored. No one will write an article about notatoad or protomyth getting hosed. I hope Paypal can get it together, but I live in fear of getting hosed by them without any recourse.
- notatoad 14y ago
  I'll admit that it's better than PayPal's previous customer service policy of "fuck all y'all", but I'm not changing my opinion of the company based on one email from a CEO in full damage control mode.

runako 14y ago

Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account). It's good that this executive (President, not the CEO as indicated in the title) is taking initiative to fix things at PayPal. But until things are fixed, PayPal is still a business risk.

jseliger 14y ago
Requiring personal supervision from an executive to withdraw funds is a negative against PayPal, because the president isn't going to personally supervise every account). True, but as you note in the second paragraph, this is still a major improvement. I stopped using Paypal a long time ago because of an utterly typical story: https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-links-paypals-bogusness-ribbed-tees-literary-friendships-literary-research-alex-tabarroks-new-book-and-more/ https://jseliger.wordpress.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-link... and have been encouraging other people not to use Paypal ever since. It's almost impossible for Paypal to be worse than it is, and it might even get better.

skennedy 14y ago

Why now? Why this situation is it finally hitting home? What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.

comex 14y ago
The email mentions that this CEO took over only five months ago.

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

Why now? Why with this story? I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service). Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?

sync 14y ago
It says right there: "I'm driving a lot of changes at PayPal (I took over 5 months ago)"
- wging 14y ago
  But 5 months is a long time. Why only now? Surely there have been high-profile cases whose media frenzies can be capitalized on before now.
  - asarazan 14y ago
    I think you're both underestimating how long it takes to really get settled in and take charge of a huge corporation, as well as overestimating just how long 5 months really is. Seems like about the right amount of time for him to start really kicking things into high gear imo.
  - joshAg 14y ago
    If I had to guess, I'd say because it took the ceo a few months to see how things are currently done and identify problems. The rest of the time I guess would be waiting for the right case to come along.
  - j79 14y ago
    Five months may seem like a long time, but trying to fix something that's pretty broken probably requires a bit of time to understand just what the hell you're trying to fix.
  - diego 14y ago

switch007 14y ago

Media storm brews, someone high up responds and resolves issue. Nothing new. It'd have been news if a random support person did the right thing.

j2kun 14y ago

"Sent from my iPad." Nice.

gcb 14y ago
Yeah. He promises to move mountains, but couldn't sit in front of his computer. Or if he routinely works from his ipad, and still have that as a signature, I'd be very doubtful of his capabilities.

appleflaxen 14y ago

It's fantastic to see PayPal finally paying attention to these kinds of nightmare stories, but it's hard to believe it has anything to do with altruism. They are seeing Stripe, Square, etc getting way more mindshare, and they are scared. With all due respect PayPal, good riddance. You've sucked too hard for too long, and now we finally have alternatives.

mcherm 14y ago

Here is what I would do... I would take him up on his offer (personal attention from the CEO? Sure!), but I would ask him whether he'd be willing to pick 3 or 4 other customers who had _NOT_ written an article which had gone viral and offer THEM the same deal. I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.

maratd 14y ago
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere. This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter". Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
- wpietri 14y ago
  How do you think a mechanism like that gets created? Do it in one go and you're talking a department of tens or hundreds of people, most of them newly hired. Turn them loose without careful thought and at the very least you create massive chaos in your organization. But you also probably create substantial losses as fraudsters use the chaos to take a lot of money. I think the only way you can get to the customer service experience you want is by starting with one customer's problems, solving them, and then changing the organization a bit so it's less dumb. Then you rinse and repeat for years. It's an organization of thousands of people across the globe, with a zillion lines of code and, a ton of procedures and habits, and a lot of institutional inertia. The way to solve it is by starting now in a manageable way, and that's what he claims he's doing.
  - jaylevitt 14y ago

coryl 14y ago

Perhaps one of the reasons PayPal is being more service conscious is they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square. I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.

rishonik 14y ago
> they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square And bitcoin. No matter how PayPal tries to put the kibosh on selling PayPal for bitcoin, people will still find a way around it. I no longer use PayPal after their first and only abuse of my account. They had one chance and I found better solutions. That the CEO is sending out emails to high PR value customers is a very telling move.

deleted 14y ago

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philhippus 14y ago

Credit where it's due: out of all the hundreds of Paypal horror stories, this is the first time I have ever seen a reasonable, let alone personable, response come from that nebulous digital beast. Fair play to the new CEO, he has won back one notch of respect and hopefully averted the slow motion train wreck that had probably already started at Paypal.

webjunkie 14y ago

Wow, just wow. If it's real. If he really means it. But still.

rhizome 14y ago

Talk is cheap, PayPal.

keithvan 14y ago

Why does it take a story to make it to front page Hacker News to get attention, to get a "direct channel" to the executives when things go wrong? It ignores the all the horrible complaints and stories from everybody else. It's inequity in itself when the only way you will get attention from big companies is from making posts on Hacker News. Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?

noonespecial 14y ago

This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise. The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.

rhizome 14y ago
The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none." This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
- yuhong 14y ago
  Even the email says that this is only the first step.
  - rhizome 14y ago
    Which leaves us only to assume there will be a second step.
    - dlikhten 14y ago
      I am always wiery of these maneuvers because they can swing both ways. I must say, good for the CEO to response; smart man who realizes the company is going to get hit, hard, and soon. The only question left is: to trust or not to trust? Let's see if PP makes any official announcements on policy to combat this.

Apocryphon 14y ago

I've always wanted to have a spreadsheet or something to keep track of the "HN effect" in which companies respond to public outrages because of their publication here. Though of course they might also get attention from Reddit and other online outlets as well.

a-priori 14y ago

PayPal is starting to feel the pressure of all these new payment startups (eg. Square, Stripe) springing up around them. They know that if they're not careful with their brand image they're going to quickly lose their lunch in the next few years.

robbeezy 14y ago

The most effective way to show displeasure with a business is to stop being a customer. Period. You can't blame the CEO here - he's simply trying to stop the bleeding before Hacker News reopens it with a machete. I've briefly worked for a payment processor - and I'm not overstating here - but this industry doesn't give 1/2 a st about your feelings of them, their customer service, or what you think of their CEOs. They only care about getting as much money as possible. Period. Peteris, keep posting of your experience and let's see if the CEO follows through. If he doesn't he'll lose twice as much respect and twice as many customers. If he does, then know you got some very expensive customer service, my friend.

redm 14y ago

One wronged customer down; thousands more, including myself, to go.

ck2 14y ago

Now he needs to write the other 100k innocent people PayPal has completely screwed with.

dmbaggett 14y ago

From the skepticism here, it's clear Mr. Marcus has his work cut out for him. Even with far fewer people ever reporting to me (directly and indirectly) than him, I sympathize with his inability to get the unvarnished truth from his own people. "We're routinely screwing people out of hard cash" is probably a scary message to relay up. His email sounded sincere, and he's new to the job. I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must know that the technorati hating his company is bad for business.

rhizome 14y ago
It's not hard to make an email sound sincere, especially when vetted by a PR agency.
- lancewiggs 14y ago
  I suspect no PR involved here - that email is repetitive, not polished, and feels like a new CEO trying to do the right thing and light a fire.
  - ivanstojic 14y ago
    In this case, I'd suspect that lighting the fire should be the first step to burning most of the customer relations department. I'll trust Paypal when I feel the smell of burning corpses from their offices.
    - protomyth 14y ago
      I would rather they fire anyone who thinks the profit they have made off interest from frozen accounts is a good thing. It is just as despicable as car companies making money off their service center. I would really like them to make a policy change that any money collected in interest off frozen accounts is given to the account holder after the freeze.
      - pbreit 14y ago

d0m 14y ago

Seriously, fuck them. They're starting to act like they care because there are new competitors who've shown how it's supposed to be done. Sorry but not for me, Stripe is my new paypal.

SquareWave 14y ago

Dear Andy , After the many years of Paypal receiving stories just like yours I'm forced to take action. The traditional Paypal long term strategy of "Hahaha, where else are you going to go for online payments?" is not a viable option anymore. It's unfortunate that your story has spread so far and so quickly. I now have to figure out how to resolve this AND try to figure out how anyone let it get this bad. Changing such entreched culture here is going to be hard. I'm going to do my best of not letting Paypal become more of a cliche of how big businesses get their foundations kicked out from under them by smaller, scarappy startups. P.S. Please,please, please don't google Stripe.

catfish 14y ago

A single email does not change a process nor a corporate culture of indifference.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

angryasian 14y ago

The level of discourse on HN lately is absurd. Here is a new CEO that appears to be looking to change things for the positive, yet everyone wants to be cynical and doubting. Yet when startups have major f* ups, the conversation is much different. Lets all admit change is slow and that paypal is still one of the more trusted payment solutions accepted globally. It would be nice to be able to use them in the future with some continued reliability.

pygorex 14y ago
The skepticism about PayPal is well founded. PayPal has rightfully earned a reputation of imposing arbitrary decisions on account holders. Maybe if PayPal was more transparent and actually provided some semblance of customer service their decisions would appear more fair. While its nice that the CEO has personally responded this actually shows a far greater dysfunction. Why should it take escalating all the way up to the CEO level to get someone at PayPal to listen and advocate for the customers position? The contrast with startups is misleading. PayPal has been in business for a long time and is a billion dollar company. They have the resources to stop making stupid mistakes, but still persist in their bad behavior. They can get away with this because they've cornered a large part of the online payments marketplace. Sure, a startup is going to make mistakes. And they're expected to. That's all a startup is really - a machine that generates mistakes in an attempt to find (or build) a profitable market.
- angryasian 14y ago
  Yes did you miss the part that they brought in a new CEO to bring change. Lets just blame everything thats happened in the past on a guy who wasn't even on the job. Blaming mistakes on lack of resources is a little naive.
teaneedz 14y ago
Well put ... PayPal has some housecleaning to do but here is someone that appears to be listening ... listening in a big way. I give PayPal credit for this response. Rather than being cynical, I'm happier giving credit to someone who wants to make things better. Mr. Marcus - some of us appreciate your efforts here.

geuis 14y ago

To everyone, on both sides, that feel this is just a stunt or a sign of real change, just give it time. Either things get better at Paypal, or they don't. Yes, big lumbering companies can change for the better. Microsoft, IBM, and Apple come to mind. Yahoo may be on that road now too. But it takes time to see. The wheels of change move slowly.

propercoil 14y ago

In the previous post David replied to the comment (on HN) i made about wanting to change paypal's generic template to increase sales through a/b testing.I had a rant about paypal's api suckness and i also ranted about how draconian the fund freezes of diaspora and wikileaks were. He said that he understands and told me to send him an email and we will take care of it. No email was sent yet as i'm afraid i'll be targeted in the future. I can't put my legitimate digital business at that risk - there are tonnage upon tonnage of forum threads over the web of people's business going under because of pp freezes only because they contacted paypal it's heart breaking and too much of a red flag to me. The only thing i can say about David is that he looks and sounds like a genuine guy who replied and started a discussion with the community and that as we all know goes a long way. So maybe his intentions are good but will paypal have zappos's culture regarding merchants all of a sudden? i doubt it and you all doubt it too because what matters is implementation ie real life.

lyime 14y ago

Legit.

DigitalSea 14y ago

While the CEO has only been onboard for 5 months now, these kind of issues plaguing Paypal have been there for years now. I remember a good friend of mine had his Paypal account frozen a few years back because they thought it was suspicious he had received money so quickly (he was selling a popular marketing eBook). After making him jump through hoops to get his money (identification, financial records and scans of his passport, etc) he finally received the cash 7 months later, by that stage he was ruined emotionally and financially due to the fact it was his living (he couldn't pay bills or anything). While I applaud the new CEO wants to make amends, for some like my friend who relied on Paypal to make a living by processing his business payments it's a little too late. Although Paypal is still the industry leader (because they have a stranglehold on online payments) the new CEO knows that offerings like Stripe and whatnot are making Paypal less and less relevant each and every day. I would love to see Paypal change, the first thing they need to do is fire all of their customer service staff and train new staff with a new set of guidelines, implement a clean-cut way of contacting Paypal if something goes wrong and clean their act up.

emilysviolins 14y ago

I hate hate hate PayPal. They ruined my ebay business!

dzhiurgis 14y ago

Link is down. Mirror / backup anyone?

j45 14y ago

The day Paypal blinked? I just was sent my first Paypal survey that I can ever remember about what else I'm using or wanting to use

ydvj 14y ago

his name is david marcus. isn't this the same guy who cheated and used protomatter in Project Genesis?

zaidmo 14y ago
And his mum is Carol Marcus? Kirk's son!

lobster45 14y ago

Back in 2006 someone hacked my paypal account and used my credit card that was attached to paypal to purchase a few ipods. The criminal had them sent to their home address. They also changed my paypal password so I was not able to login. I contacted paypal support and they were absolutely not willing to help even. It was terrible customer service. I have never used paypal since.

macarthy12 14y ago

I think this represents a stay of execution for PayPal. I bashed them in the past, but maybe there is some hope.

ars 14y ago

The CEO also posted a reply to the original story here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485627 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4485627 http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidmarcus http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidmarcus

hollerith 14y ago

Posting screenshots of text instead of text make me sad. It excludes visually-challenged people from this discussion, makes old people get out their glasses and squint, and makes cutting and pasting impossible.

RobotCaleb 14y ago
Not to mention random emails about stuff with no attached context.

lordastral 14y ago

Okay which one of you hacked the Paypal CEO's account?

jongraehl 14y ago

What the CEO is doing is effective. He's signaling that he really wants to fix things and won't make excuses. I doubt the CEO will learn much he didn't already know by a "direct line" case study, but humbling himself in this way might give him the lever he needs to really move company culture. PayPal can keep most of its anti-fraud effectiveness while improving customer service for those innocents who want to recover from misclassification. Either being more trusting, or spending more effort discerning who can be trusted, will cost them money short term. But if they don't do it, they'll lose some of their customers to competitors who will.

miffydiffy 14y ago

Screenshots are more confident than copy&paste of text.

marginalboy 14y ago

That's classy.

perlgeek 14y ago

To all the naysayers out there: in your opinion, what could the CEO have written to convince you? He doesn't have the option to go back in time to change what happened, only to respond. If I'd receive such an email, I'd give 'em a second chance.

chris_wot 14y ago
I wonder if they cleared thir backlog of 100,000 complaints from 2002? [1] Seriously, PayPal has had the same atrocious customer service now for well over a decade now, one email from a new CEO means exactly nothing in the grand scheme of things. 1. http://pub.bna.com/eclr/021227.htm http://pub.bna.com/eclr/021227.htm

niketdesai 14y ago

I think we should make judgement on the outcome rather than the email (since it's basically speculation anyways). Judge: Do these types of problems happen in the same amount and severity in 6 months? (or whatever time horizon you think is agreeable to see significant progress). And there shouldn't be mockery for him fixing one account. Sure there are many to go, but before this account was in the same boat...so it's an improvement no matter how small. Whatever Andy said in his post really resonated to D. Marcus; now I hope it really is the catalyst for PayPal to improve. edited shortened it up.

tsieling 14y ago

Nice gesture, but how many people are going to have the same reach in their complaints? It would be nitpicking to say the email fails the corporate sociopath-speak test with 'leverage the issues', but what irks me is asking for the help of someone your company has just offended. The frame of mind of a non-sociopath would be to say 'how can I help earn back your trust?'. I've given up on PayPal for my meagre needs, but anyone with real money on the line should beat a path from them until their actions truly speak louder than their words. Speaking of words, I noticed a TOS update from them but haven't read it yet, so if they have taken positive steps then add grains of salt to this comment, to taste.

treskot 14y ago

Reminds me of the proverb "do good nd cast into the river". If you want the world to know about it I would simply consider it a PR stunt. Maybe the Paypal CEO had a positive intent and the Marketing team / PR team wanted to brag about it to the entire world. That's how the corporate world is though!