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Why We No Longer Accept PayPal

• protomyth 14y ago
  So, I guess we will see a lot of these articles if trusts are that common and using PayPal. What advantages do trusts have in Australia?
  • apedley 14y ago
    They are common for small businesses ($50K+ revenue per year into the millions) not so much micro businesses. Trusts offer additional asset protection and tax benefits for business owners. Most accountants recommend this structure when setting up a business for you. There are more articles out there with PayPal and trusts however since Micro businesses are most likely the heavy users of PayPal, they are generally setup as a sole trader or Pty ltd hence comply with PayPal's terms.
• jamesjguthrie 14y ago
  I'm not going to go anywhere near PayPal when I finally launch due to the risk of payment freezes etc.
• flyinglizard 14y ago
  Just remember than some of the issues merchants are facing stem from PayPal's customer protection policies (I say some, not all, because I'm sure a large part of it is human error or silly policies as happens in large organizations). The fact PayPal has merchants on a short leash should help the confidence of its users, and with all the security breaches and database leaks going on, it's good to know my CC number is not out there in multiple merchant databases.
• URSpider94 14y ago
  Looks like this is a known issue in Australia. http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1323826 http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/archive/1323826 It's also mentioned on Paypal.au's business page.
  • apedley 14y ago
    yes it is. I did look into it further once I received the email. My own fault for not reading the ToS throughly but I am not the only one who has been through it.
• highace 14y ago
  You were fortunate that Paypal were 'kind' enough to let you have the money in your account before closing it, I wouldn't have expected that! I guess that says something about their reputation.
  • apedley 14y ago
    Yes we were. I was actually surprised they did this from all the stories I had heard.
• equalarrow 14y ago
  I was contracting for the first half of this year and my employer preferred Freshbooks and Paypal. I was like, ok, I've had my paypal acct for years hooked up to my checking account, so I figured 'fine'. Luckily through the whole engagement I was able to get paid and money transferred without any issues. Then when it was done, I decided to treat the family to a nice vacation (which had nothing to do with paypal). On this vacation, I read a book that made me sentimental for some tech I group up with as a kid, so I went on ebay and ordered a bunch of things. Transactions ranged from a few dollars up to $200; nothing gigantic. After I got home (and vaca was sadly over), paypal sent me an email asking me to confirm my business buyer status. Of course, there's no way to easily contact customer service and replying to email wasn't very helpful. Buried in their help section was a way to submit a support request, which I did, explaining that I'm not a business, etc. I got a response saying that they were closing my account. At first I was bummed, but then I was thinkin, screw it. Paypal's never been customer friendly and if this how they were gonna be, then I have no problems walking away from them. So, good riddance I guess.
  • relix 14y ago
    But you were being paid through Paypal as a freelancer. I'm guessing that makes you a business for Paypal.
    • jamesbritt 14y ago
      How would Paypal know why someone is getting money?
      • TylerE 14y ago
        Regular consistent amounts at set intervals is a bit of a giveaway.
• throwaway503 14y ago
  Paypal have had their share of bad customer experiences. However it is clear in the Paypal policies that trusts are not allowed to own accounts. If someone was ignorant to not notice that, I believe it is unfair to point fingers at Paypal.
• jameswyse 14y ago
  I've had to go with paypal for a recent project, I've not run in to any problems like this yet but their automated payments system and API are horrible to work with, especially with it being a nodejs project. It just sucks that there's no real alternative in Australia yet, though pin.net.au is showing promise, hopefully they'll go live soon!
  • apedley 14y ago
    I would just recommend getting a payment gateway and merchant account. I am with eWay which only costs $350 per year + 50 cents per transaction. My merchant account costs a bit less per year plus a percentage of the transaction which is less than 50% of PayPal's transaction charge. It takes longer to setup and I wouldn't really recommend them for micro businesses but they are certainly great for small businesses.
• marek12886 14y ago
  There seem to have been many of these horror stories over the past couple of years. And especially if you're a small business, not having access to your funds is just completely unacceptable.
  • apedley 14y ago
    Thats the part that makes PayPal unbearable. As mentioned above I have had questions asked from my merchant provider over transactions but at no point did they freeze my account. They called me, sorted out the issue and my business kept running as usual.
    • sounders 14y ago
      Who is your merchant provider? I'm curious because I've heard similar rants about many products that process payments for merchants- Paypal, Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, etc.. I'm interested how your provider is able to circumvent all this red-tape that larger companies seem to have.
      • apedley 14y ago
        My merchant provider is with my local bank. If you deal with a bank it suprisingly much nicer than dealing with merchants such as Amazon, Google or PayPal
• js951534 14y ago
  The faster PayPal dies the better, those guys are real scumbags, imagine if a bank could just freeze your account like these people do, worse than that they are not even regulated like a bank! Would you trust your money to a private company that acts like a bank but is not regulated like one?
  • Karunamon 14y ago
    Unless you're in the EU that is - PayPal does have banking regulations applied there. Something I'm noticing is that most of the PayPal horror stories come from the USA. How much trouble do they cause to people across the pond?
  • dangrossman 14y ago
    Banks and PayPal are regulated to the same degree. Banks do freeze merchant accounts exactly the same way PayPal freezes accounts, for exactly the same reasons, for exactly the same periods of time. They have exactly the same policies because these policies come down from the Visa and MasterCard Operating Regulations that both banks and PayPal are bound to. PayPal is licensed in all 50 states and is a registered bank in more than a handful of countries. Whatever difference you think there would be if they were also a bank in the US, instead of just having their accounts underwritten by two banks (JP Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo NA), I don't think that difference exists. @dkl: I'd like to reply to your comment but it's [dead] and there's no contact info in your bio. The answer should be fairly obvious if you think about it, and has been discussed on HN in virtually every previous thread about PayPal. I've had my own merchant account underwritten by the largest private bank in the United States frozen in the past.
    • deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    • dkl 14y ago
      Why have I seen "Paypal froze my account" dozens of times, but never the same about a bank?
    • rm999 14y ago
• Legion 14y ago
  Paypal security seems to be a perpetual case of the cure being worse than the disease. They're chasing away the real business along with the fraud.
  • deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  • rm999 14y ago
    I've been banned from Paypal, I assume because my account has been hacked twice (they never gave a concrete reason) among 100s of legitimate transactions over many years. What is frustrating is "this limitation cannot be appealed" - it seems to me that the true scammers wouldn't even try appealing, so I think they are firing me rather than accusing me of acting maliciously. Fair enough - they are a business who wants to maximize profit, and I was being a 'bad' customer. But I think this is short-sighted; they are a social payment network and every lost customer is millions of potential payment links destroyed. I've already made a few people use competing services to send me money. Paypal has consistently thrown out the opportunity to be a de facto online payment standard in exchange for a higher margin.
    • apedley 14y ago
      I have experienced support issues with PayPal as well. I once had a customer on a subscription that froze. It was a bug in their system and all I got from PayPal was "how are we sure they signed up for this subscription". In the end they didn't help, I cancelled the subscription and had to ask the customer to signup again.
• Karunamon 14y ago
  A dead throwaway account posted this: Paypal have had their share of bad customer experiences. However it is clear in the Paypal policies that trusts are not allowed to own accounts. If someone was ignorant to not notice that, I believe it is unfair to point fingers at Paypal. I have to agree. I can forgive a random individual for not reading a ToS, but as a business? That's unforgivable. PayPal might be skeevy, but you can't fault them when they follow their own written and publicly available rules.
  • maratd 14y ago
    > you can't fault them when they follow their own written and publicly available rules. This makes sense only in the context of choice. If your business revolves around selling on eBay, PayPal is the only viable choice. If PayPal wrote that they own your firstborn in their TOS, and every professional seller on eBay was made aware of this fact, their market share would not change. Anyone who has used PayPal for any sort of volume (thousands per day), hates PayPal with a passion that cannot be described. And they continue to use it. Because they have no choice. So, yeah, it's perfectly fair to point fingers at PayPal when they continue to make these asinine changes. Because when it comes down to it, for the majority of their customers, it's either use them or go out of business.
    • Karunamon 14y ago
      >If your business revolves around selling on eBay, PayPal is the only viable choice. Then either your business model needs to change, or you need to follow the rules (i.e. no trusts owning an account) that you agreed to when you signed up. Those are the two options. Whether or not paypal sucks has no bearing on the fact that the author was in violation of the terms of service he agreed to and had his account terminated for it. Could they have handled it better? Sure. Are they under any obligation to? Nope. Again, if this were a random individual person I would sympathize completely, but you do not, as a business, enter any contract without full appreciation for the terms you're binding yourself and your organization to. Just because he was ignorant of those terms doesn't mean they don't exist.
      • 14y ago
• jredwards 14y ago
  shouldn't that be 'Why PayPal No Longer Accepts Us'?
  • apedley 14y ago
    Technically, yes :)
• genki 14y ago
  I feel like this is a poorly written article. It doesn't present any sort of position, and the initial anecdote about the customer service issues and the author's indecision regarding support for Paypal have nothing to do with the subsequent issue, which (as has been stated) was simply a matter of not understanding Paypal's terms of service in the first place. I guess I'm not sure what the point is. This doesn't seem to have anything to do with Paypal's poor customer service, nor does it seem to condemn Paypal's policy of not allowing trusts. It just seems to be another "me-too" article about no longer supporting Paypal as a method of payment, and it wasn't even a conscious choice by the business to discontinue that support.
  • rquantz 14y ago
    It was a blog post explaining to customers why they could no longer pay with PayPal. I don't think it needed to be a polemic.
    • apedley 14y ago
      Thanks rquantz. It wasn't meant to be a hate piece on PayPal or anything else other than just my thoughts on what had happened and events surrounding it. As I updated in my article it was there to let my customers know what had happened and that it isn't such a big deal for businesses to move on from PayPal.
• deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
• LilValleyBigEgo 14y ago
  tl;dr: 30% of our customers are irrelevant to us.
• georgemcbay 14y ago
  I tried to use Paypal for the first time in a year about a month ago. Tried to add funds from a bank account I had confirmed through their process years ago and which has been linked to the account for ages. This transaction caused them to suspend much of my account until I could provide them with photocopies of all three of my license, social security card and a utility bill with my current address. According to their instructions none of these documents could be older than 6 months. Somehow they expect me to have a driver's license and social security card neither of which is older than 6 months. I'm sure I could have called them and cleared up the matter after wasting an hour or more dealing with their support, but instead I just said fuck it and decided not to use Paypal anymore. Fuck you, Paypal.
  • apedley 14y ago
    It's the easiest thing to do.