5 ms·

I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.

by esskay 1y ago

unixhero 1y ago
In the real world, not in computer user world, people use what is avilable to them that works. Paypal is that.
- lucb1e 1y ago
  Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens) As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
  - tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
    If the merchant screws you on a transaction paid via IBAN transfer, how do you get your money back?
    - lucb1e 1y ago
      Same as if Paypal screws me, or the store I just bought something in... you talk to them and if they don't cooperate you take it to court (small claims hopefully). So far, nobody I know has needed to take a shop to court. It's extremely rare, but yes it sure happens If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
- mapmeld 1y ago
  I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way. That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
  - bze12 1y ago
    Nonprofits are major targets of card testing fraud, I wonder if that is related
  - internetter 1y ago
    > and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want* * subject to fraud protection. This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
    - kragen 1y ago
      These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment). And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
      - internetter 1y ago
        > These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
IshKebab 1y ago
It's pretty convenient when it's offered as a checkout option and it lets you avoid filling in your details yet again. I wouldn't store any money in it though.
- hocuspocus 1y ago
  Major browsers have been doing that for what, 10 years? And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
  - IshKebab 1y ago
    It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use). Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay. Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.
root_axis 1y ago
PayPal is an excellent product for consumers. The periodic horror stories that appear on this site are relatively rare and typically only affect businesses.
TacticalCoder 1y ago
[dead]
mitkebes 1y ago
Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you. My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
- hamstercat 1y ago
  Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.
  - gloryjulio 1y ago
    Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
  - moritonal 1y ago
    A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.
  - mastazi 1y ago
    with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount. Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
  - lmm 1y ago
    After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.
analog31 1y ago
I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable. Some advantages for me: 1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure. 2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless. 3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee. 4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business. From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be: 1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others. 2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
- cm2187 1y ago
  Plus the convenience for users. Don't make me fill dozens of fields on some forms every time I want to buy something.
- Syntaf 1y ago
  Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues. Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs. [1] https://embolt.app https://embolt.app
- noduerme 1y ago
  To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it. So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
egypturnash 1y ago
I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets. Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
- __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
  Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
  - egypturnash 1y ago
    They're not as openly shitty at least. Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
    - staplers 1y ago
      Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out. Bitcoin hasn't really changed in over a decade and is trading at all time highs. What "didn't work out" in your mind?
      - dominojab 1y ago
        [dead]
      - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
        It hasn't solved the problem it set out to solve. We still have to chose between untrustworthy middlemen for handling our payment infrastructure. It gave up a decade ago. I wouldn't call that "working out".
WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago
I used to use both PayPal and Stripe for my online business Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow

I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.

by esskay 1y ago

I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.

unixhero 1y ago

In the real world, not in computer user world, people use what is avilable to them that works. Paypal is that.

lucb1e 1y ago
Only when it's the literal only option at checkout. Then it's the merchant's choice, not my problem. When possible, I'll always opt to use a different instantaneous method (e.g. iDeal or direct debit), or give the merchant my money directly and wait 3 days for the IBAN transfer to go through. Using paypal just risks the money being indefinitely frozen on either side and them taking a cut for the privilege, if it works on a particular day in the first place (no mysterious errors or infinite loading screens) As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 1y ago
  If the merchant screws you on a transaction paid via IBAN transfer, how do you get your money back?
  - lucb1e 1y ago
    Same as if Paypal screws me, or the store I just bought something in... you talk to them and if they don't cooperate you take it to court (small claims hopefully). So far, nobody I know has needed to take a shop to court. It's extremely rare, but yes it sure happens If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
mapmeld 1y ago
I think it's from people who are programmed from early e-commerce days to think using their credit card online is an extreme risk, and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way. That said, I know some small nonprofits where that's their preferred way to donate online.
- bze12 1y ago
  Nonprofits are major targets of card testing fraud, I wonder if that is related
- internetter 1y ago
  > and that Paypal is shielding them or insuring their purchase in some way Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want* * subject to fraud protection. This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
  - kragen 1y ago
    These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. But the cryptocurrency transactions are nonrepudiable, which is beneficial in some contexts (a friend of mine had his laptop stolen via a PayPal chargeback, and porn sites have had lots of problems opening and keeping credit card merchant accounts) and a drawback in others (the ripped clothing shipment mentioned in a sibling comment). And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
    - internetter 1y ago
      > These are mostly the same features Bitcoin/Ethereum provides to senders. Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time

IshKebab 1y ago

It's pretty convenient when it's offered as a checkout option and it lets you avoid filling in your details yet again. I wouldn't store any money in it though.

hocuspocus 1y ago
Major browsers have been doing that for what, 10 years? And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  It's still more convenient than browser auto-fill (which I also use). Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay. Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.

root_axis 1y ago

PayPal is an excellent product for consumers. The periodic horror stories that appear on this site are relatively rare and typically only affect businesses.

TacticalCoder 1y ago

[dead]

mitkebes 1y ago

Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you. My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.

hamstercat 1y ago
Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.
- gloryjulio 1y ago
  Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal
- moritonal 1y ago
  A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.
- mastazi 1y ago
  with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount. Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
- lmm 1y ago
  After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.

analog31 1y ago

I've had a PP merchant account for well over a decade, to sell a boring, non computer related gadget. I make roughly one sale per business day, with typical statistical variation. PP has been nearly 100% reliable. Some advantages for me: 1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure. 2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless. 3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee. 4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business. From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be: 1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others. 2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.

cm2187 1y ago
Plus the convenience for users. Don't make me fill dozens of fields on some forms every time I want to buy something.
Syntaf 1y ago
Yep 100% agreed here. I run a member management platform[1] for small clubs which generally use PP to fundraise and collect member dues. Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs. [1] https://embolt.app https://embolt.app
noduerme 1y ago
To your horror stories, while I'm sure many of them do involve legitimate disputes, I stopped accepting PayPal payments about a decade ago after what they did to a friend of mine. He and his wife owned a small hotel that took payment several ways, including Paypal. They didn't have too many customers paying that way and had allowed something over $10,000 to pile up in their Paypal account over time. When they tried to withdraw it, Paypal froze their account and requested all sorts of additional verification. But even after they provided all this, Paypal refused to unfreeze the account. This dragged on for over a year. By the time they paid lawyers and brought legal proceedings, it was hardly worth it. So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.

egypturnash 1y ago

I do art for a very queer market and lately I've been trying to get people to pay me via Zelle, because using Paypal is putting pennies in the pocket of rich dipshits like Elon Musk or Peter Thiel, who put that money into Republican candidate pockets. Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.

__MatrixMan__ 1y ago
Do you think that the rich dipshits that Zelle enables are significantly better? They're just responsible for an older slower form of the same abuse. We desperately need a ethical alternative, buy I think were going to have to build it ourselves.
- egypturnash 1y ago
  They're not as openly shitty at least. Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
  - staplers 1y ago
    Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out. Bitcoin hasn't really changed in over a decade and is trading at all time highs. What "didn't work out" in your mind?
    - dominojab 1y ago
      [dead]
    - __MatrixMan__ 1y ago
      It hasn't solved the problem it set out to solve. We still have to chose between untrustworthy middlemen for handling our payment infrastructure. It gave up a decade ago. I wouldn't call that "working out".

WhereIsTheTruth 1y ago

I used to use both PayPal and Stripe for my online business Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow