Hacker News Reader

Comment by quasse | Hacker News Reader

I'm just starting to need a real solution for taking regular payments and Paypal didn't even cross my mind as a serious contender. The business model they've cultivated engenders similar levels of trust to car salesmen and the people who charge lost equipment fees at Comcast.

I'm looking at Paysimple for their integrated invoicing and transaction handling but I'd love to hear what other people use.

View on HN

I used to help run a rather large fan convention. For our first 5 years (starting in about late 2003 or so), PayPal was the only option we offered for registering online. At the time, they were really the only option for implementing online payments easily without the complexity of a full merchant stack (and it was just me doing the programming, volunteering to help them while I was still in college).

By the time we finally switched away from them, we were probably clearing $60k or so a year through them, with a very large percentage of that coming over the course of a week or so just before the event. People like to wait until the last minute. :)

We never had any issues, but we were very vigilant about transferring funds out of PayPal every few days just in case. We did finally stop using them, probably about 2009 or 2010, when stories like OP's started to become widespread.

For us, having them "hold" our funds for 6 months would have bankrupted us. The hotel wants to be paid on Monday after the event. Vendors need to be paid within 30 days. Things like that would have been impossible for us to do if they decided to sit on the money. We were a volunteer fan convention; we didn't have the financial cushion to withstand something like that.

Not to mention the fees were higher than a standard merchant account. We finally did switch to a merchant account through Elavon and, after I left, I think they switched to Stripe. Either way, they don't accept PayPal now because the financial risk to them that could result from PayPal freezing the funds is significant.

The last project I worked on required integrating with clients' existing payment infrastructure, including merchant accounts, and processing their customers' payments for them in addition to billing them a small monthly fee (we didn't take any piece of customer payments). We used Chargify. It was pricey, I think about $120/mo to support ACH for a few hundred clients, but the API is solid and well-documented. They've got several employees whose job it is to work on the official libraries, as well.

I am no longer a Chargify customer because that project never really panned out. I don't have any official relationship with them.

The one-stop-shops are definitely slick and easy to get started. But when you start doing serious amounts of transactions you really have to shop for competitive rates and consider other less sexy gateway providers.

I don't know anything about chargify but even stripe will negotiate with you if you reach a certain volume. Once you start paying tens or hundreds of thousands in fees, those percentage point fractions become a big deal!

Absolutely! One thing I liked about Chargify was that you used whatever payment gateway[0] you wanted, including Stripe.

I don't know if you can negotiate with the gateway directly at large volume even if you're going through Chargify - I suspect not, but it'd be worth a shot.

[0] https://www.chargify.com/payment-gateways/

I'm working at a startup that processes millions of dollars per month in payments. If you don't offer PayPal, you're shooting yourself in the foot. In many countries, PayPal is the defacto way people conduct online transactions. As much love as Stripe gets because of how developer friendly it is, in the real world people use what they know. And what they know is PayPal. I don't see a compelling reason not to offer it as an option.

Waking up one day to find that "your" money is no longer yours is not a compelling reason? I myself had nothing but bad experience with Paypal going back almost a decade, hell with them.

Luckily I need to accept payments mostly from government customers, which means mostly ACH and debit card. I think PayPal would be seen as pretty mickey mouse actually.

Agreed, we offer Credit Card and Paypal and have close to half our customers using PayPal.

In terms of the horror stories I think it depends a lot on your business. For someone like us sending relatively predictable large volume through in the mostly $25-$150 range we have never had an issue. At most we probably only ever had a $50k exposure to PayPal as you can withdraw as often as you want.

This is what pains me the most: the fact that PayPal is considered the biggest standard, when they are really terrible.

Netherland has proper internet payment infrastructure called iDeal: it goes directly from one bank account to the other, with no sleazy middlemen in between. That's what the rest of the world should be using, but Netherland just doesn't have the weight to push its solutions on the rest of the world, so we're stuck with crap like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard.

(I suspect many other countries also have well-working payment systems within their borders, but none have any international reach. I'd expect that SEPA would lead to a reliable internet payment system on a European scale, but that hasn't happened yet.)

I do some work with a non-profit. We use paypal to collect fees/dues from our about 400 members. It works fine. In the 7 years we've been using them we've yet to experience any problems. We aren't high volume.

I think the internet echo chamber makes Paypal seem out to be really bad, when the truth is all payment processors have their bad days.

People have heard of paypal and trust them. We had a few questions about it when we started (Do you really get the money if I use paypal).

Yeah, I use them all the time without problems. The trick to that is being sure I can probably trust the person on the other end. I reduce risk where possible, esp with reputation tools.

Of course not everybody has problems with PayPal. If they did, PayPal would have been dead by now. But there have been way too many cases where PayPal clearly took money that wasn't theirs, and thereby endangered business and customer interests. Even one such case should be enough to disqualify them as payment provider. It is not their money. They should just enable the transaction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com