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About time, but $25M is nothing for them. Nowadays we have all our clients using Stripe for their CC processing, but back in the day, our clients could use any

• aleksandrm 11y ago
  Agreed, $25M is nothing and they should be slapped with a much higher penalty. PayPal is the scummiest company on Earth. A buyer opened a dispute with them, and PayPal robbed me of $2500, tried fighting them for 2 years but eventually gave up.
  • coffeedrinker 11y ago
    PayPal has some serious issues with regards to what you say, but I used it last summer to transfer money from USA to Europe for my daughter and the fee was a fraction of what the bank wanted. Banks can be pretty scummy in their own way.
    • 1_player 11y ago
      Have you ever tried TransferWise? With customers and family around the world, I'm thinking of switching to them to handle transfers instead of Paypal/Stripe. They seem to have the most honest fees around. Disclaimer: not affiliated with them. Just genuinely curious.
      • dhimes 11y ago
        I use them. It's been great so far.
      • toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Bump for TransferWise. They're a treat to work with!
      • gav 11y ago
        I've used Xoom in the past as to send money to family in the UK, it's always been fast and easy. However they charge $4.99 up to $2999, with TransferWise there's no fee and slightly better rates (0.6346 vs. 0.6262). I'm going to try them out next time, thanks for the tip!
      • vezycash 11y ago
        About TransferWise. I checked their site based on your recommendation. However, something bothers me. There's a form on the Top-right corner. "You send," "You Receive." I tried checking how much would be received in dollars if I sent $1000. However, the form wouldn't let me. It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency. It felt shady to me. I've sent this message to them already. But wow! They do support a lot of countries - far more than Stripe. I'm surprised I've never heard of them before.
        • lucaspiller 11y ago
          > It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency. Their use case is transferring funds between currencies, why would you want to do that?
          • Dylan16807 11y ago
            The site says "transfer money abroad". If for some reason they only want the more difficult kind of transfer, it would help to make that clear. I'm confused by you asking why when the answer is both obvious and explicitly stated in parent comments. Sending someone money in a different country, but they happen to use the same currency.
    • Moru 11y ago
      I always compare with my normal bank when I'm forced to use paypal and so far they have always been slightly higher than the bank. I live in Sweden though.
      • fapjacks 11y ago
        My wife uses Nordea and they go out on a limb for her every time she needs something (and she lives in the US with me, so hardly can go into the bank for things).
        • Moru 11y ago
          Nordea and Handelsbanken is probably the best big banks when it comes to service.
          • fapjacks 11y ago
            I can't pretend to know, but she always seems happy with their service.
          • scrollaway 11y ago
            I've heard good and bad things about both of them. I've been looking for a better international alternative, though. Simple bank looks absolutely amazing (https://www.simple.com/ https://www.simple.com/), but sadly they are US-only. Does anyone know a similar bank to Simple that is friendlier to international travelers/EU citizens?
        • linuskendall 11y ago
          Curiously for use abroad ICA banken (affiliated with the grocery store of the same name) turns out to be really beneficial, free withdrawals anywhere in the world and completely aligned with remote customer service (as they don't in fact have any branches that they can ask you to visit..).
  • ryanlol 11y ago
    And the exact same thing could've happened with credit cards.
    • snarfy 11y ago
      You have a lot more rights to fight them when fighting a bank. With PayPal you probably agreed to third party arbitration.
  • Lawtonfogle 11y ago
    >PayPal is the scummiest company on Earth. Maybe second. Nestle still wins worst place with their infant formula scandal.
  • fastball 11y ago
    Scummiest for sellers. They are quite a good deal for buyers.
• silverbax88 11y ago
  This is something I've seen as well - PayPal does not like the idea (for some reason) of people using their service for events. I'm personally aware of two event coordinators who had large sums of money tied up by PayPal at the last minute (around $10k and $20k) so that I never used them for my own events. Stripe all the way, never a problem.
  • hga 11y ago
    I gather that PayPal's secret to success is strong anti-fraud measures (and not caring about false positives), and one of them is freezing accounts that get a flood of money all at once. That also is a pattern you see in events and charities set up for a new disaster.
    • saurik 11y ago
      PayPal does not consider conferences a "false positive". Small events often fail: the speakers cancel, the venue falls through, not enough people buy tickets to cover costs... if you are using incoming ticket money today for things, you are essentially taking investments, not payments. PayPal's response to this is to hold most of the money until one day after the conference, as otherwise, when your conference fails, and the attendees make a ton of chargebacks, they know they are going to not be able to get their money back and they will be out thousands of dollars. This is not unreasonable behavior on their part, and is part of a very consistent pattern of response: they don't let you use their service to sell promises of any kind. This actually leads to PayPal being very user-focussed--essentially always protecting users from even having to think about whether something might end up stealing their money--which is actually good for those for users, and by proxy, good for those of us who use PayPal to sell legitimate products. (FWIW, you can use PayPal to sell event tickets, but be prepared to appreciate what is happening in the mind of PayPal--which should hopefully cause you to not being unreasonable or abrasive in your communication, though even if they were being bad that isn't an excuse to get angry at them--and reach out to their underwriting department to prove you are financially solvent in a way that doesn't rely on the success of the event, and preferably also provide evidence that your event will also work.)
• Moru 11y ago
  I once ordered some things together with a few friends. The total sum ended up around $3500, much more than I usually buy for. The buy went through and the company got the message from Paypal that everything was ok and the money was on their account. Sadly they had a vacation day (small home-run company) and did not send the items directly. Two days later when they were back, Paypal had just pulled the money back from their account and left the message that the user disputes the buy or something like that. I had done no such thing. One month later I got the money back except for $20 for 'investigation charges' or some such... If the company would not have been on vacation at that time they would have sent the goods and we would have gotten both the things and our money back. I ended up transfering the money via the bank as normal and got the stuff about $100 cheaper than over Paypal. Haven't used Paypal since.
  • cmdrfred 11y ago
    $20 in 'investigation fees'? can anyone confirm this? I won't use them again if true.
    • asddubs 11y ago
      I once had someone initiate a chargeback over 5 transactions of 10$ they paid via CC. It ended up costing me 100$ because on top of the 10$ they charged back, every transaction also added a 10$ fee for being charged back. So I was scammed, and then had to give paypal 50$ for it on top of that.
      • speleding 11y ago
        Are you sure those were from PayPal? I've been charged those fees, but they were passing on the fees from the credit card company that the payment came from.
        • asddubs 11y ago
          Well, that could be the case. Either way, someone sent me 50$ and I ended up losing those and paying another 50$. That shouldn't really happen when you just have a private paypal account. This wasn't a commercial transaction.
• ripter 11y ago
  I have a friend who's small business was killed by Paypal. He had a board game shop (about five employees), but most of his business was online. He used Paypal as his bank account (dumb idea, I know.) During a christmas rush Paypal suddenly froze the account. I don't remember the exact reasons they gave, but it was something like he had too much money or was receiving money too fast.
• sshanky 11y ago
  I sold an iPhone on eBay once. More than three months later, I received an email from PayPal stating that I'd been charged back because the buyer was disputing her credit card transaction ("Buyer stated that they did not authorize the purchase"). Although I always pull any balance out of PayPal, I owed them the balance. I was required to find proof that I had received the order (right there on eBay), and that I had shipped it (shipping label had been created, and was also visible on eBay). They ended up reversing the chargeback, but the strange thing was how much work I had to do, when it was all systematically available to them.
  • woah 11y ago
    I once did a chargeback against an eBay merchant who never delivered. PayPal was no help, and they strongly advised me against the chargeback. Ultimately, charge backs are part and parcel of receiving credit card payment, and as a consumer I am glad they exist.
    • colechristensen 11y ago
      The real core business competence of a payment processor isn't handling or distributing money, it's dispute arbitration.
      • pjc50 11y ago
        Yes, absolutely; and this is one of the things that Bitcoin advocacy ignores. It goes in the other direction: all transfers are final, legitimate or otherwise.
        • MertsA 11y ago
          The problem I have with just about every payment processor out there is something that Bitcoin does well with from a protocol perspective. Right now you can copy a credit card with a mag reader in seconds, compromising some website that accepts credit cards means no limits to how much you can spend with other merchants, even having your credit card number stored in an RFID tag that can be read from a few feet away inconspicuously! The status quo might mean that money can be clawed back after it's sent but identity fraud (or using someone else's credentials) should not be a problem in 2015, we've had SIM cards that can provide a secure method for identifying a physical device since the 90s. Why can't any payment processor come up with a decent alternative to having a magic number that you have to give out all the time that can be used to authorize arbitrary transactions? Maybe eventually every citizen will get a smart card of some kind and we can just use that.
• sblawrie 11y ago
  What if you just need a page (the page can be external to your own site) that accepts payment and emails you a receipt, and you don't want to write any server-side code? Can Stripe do that the way PayPal can?
  • heyalexej 11y ago
    Absolutely. And it's incredibly simple, too: https://stripe.com/checkout https://stripe.com/checkout Alternatively you have always solutions like https://gumroad.com/ https://gumroad.com/ or https://simplegoods.co/ https://simplegoods.co/ of which you can see a real world implementation here: http://foundersgrid.com/sponsor http://foundersgrid.com/sponsor (No affiliation with any of these, just found it the other day.)
    • sblawrie 11y ago
      But all of these just hand you back a token which you then have to pass to your server for actually processing the charge. What if you don't want to set up any server-side code? Or am I missing something...
• gav 11y ago
  To add to the anti-PayPal anecdotes: I once used it to checkout from a merchant that I hadn't used before and didn't trust; there was no shipping charge added until I completed the order. Given the merchant didn't respond to emails, I contacted PayPal. They couldn't do anything until the order was shipped, then after it did they didn't care because the guarantee only covers receiving the item that was promised. It's a combination of a bad UX that won't confirm the price of the order until you've confirmed and service that's lacking compared to using a credit card.
• yuhong 11y ago
  I am beginning to think that probably a good comparison of PayPal would be a firewall where people report packets to be looked at manually. Braintree works differently and should not have the same problems.