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Comment by sageabilly | Hacker News Reader

Is PayPal still around simply because, as one of the earliest and one of the biggest payment facilitators on the Internet, it's become ubiquitous enough to not have to worry about being displaced? I cannot for the life of me understand how it's still a thing since every week there's yet another story of "PayPay did Shady Thing that a bank couldn't do and now I have no money and no way to get my money back."

Why is PayPal not dead? In all my research I have never been able to come up with a good answer to that question.

[edited to add] Aside from consumer ignorance of other options, that is.

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We've been using PayPal for over 10 years. High volume. No complaints. Their dispute resolution service is better than others we've tried in the past (Braintree, BluePay). Fees are solid. Customer support team are pretty on top of things (if you feel like picking up a phone).

Seems like people like to pick on PayPal because they want to see the new 'startups' win. But PayPal doesn't have to lose for them to win.

To expand. We thought about switching to Stripe once. Implementation was fairly annoying compared to PayPal's which was surprising considering how loved they are by the dev community. Their fees were much higher. Support couldn't answer some relatively easy questions. Stupid turnaround time for bank deposits.

I can understand how getting setup with a Stripe branded payment form is easy and saves some hassle for a new project. But as an established business they don't bring much to the table. We passed and skipped the obligatory 'X Sucks Because Y' article.

We've had pretty much the opposite experience. We've used PayPal for a little less than a year. Setup is magnificently complex and perplexing. They assume that companies are people. There's no way in hell the CEO/owner of a business would spend 1.5 hour on the phone with an account manager, setting up the account. Want PayPal to transfer british pound to an non-british bank-account, then prepare for a world of pain.

Their dispute resolution service is annoying a hell. Not that we don't want to resolve disputes with our customers, but we want to do it using our existing customer support channels. Not via PayPal. Having customers just randomly getting their money back without having contacted the business they bought the product from first isn't acceptable.

It's the most expensive of all the payment solutions we offer our customer. Developer support is okay, but not helpful when their stuff doesn't work. We randomly get 500 errors from their REST api, which doesn't handle any sort of real volume. Black Friday pretty much killed PayPal.

The PayPal web interface is the worst I've ever used. It's slow and almost impossible to search in. Searching using your own order numbers almost never works and you fall back to searching for customers last name, which is pretty much the only search that consistently work.

We wouldn't use PayPal if our German customers didn't expect it.

Very weird. Perhaps their European service differs?

I've never had to call them to set anything up. Black Friday they handled our volume with no hiccups. I can't remember if there's been a time when their endpoint was down for us.

UI and dispute resolution is personal preference. I think the new interface is nice. Much faster than the old one. Easier to use. Search works. We only search by email address / last name though.

Dispute resolution through other vendors, like Braintree before being acquired, was handled via snail mail and fax. In comparison PayPal's process is amazing. You also didn't have a chance in hell of winning a chargeback with Braintree. At least PayPal offers some protection and will see the process through. If your customer wants their money back without contacting you they can do it anytime they please. That doesn't have anything to do with PayPal.

There's no way in hell the CEO/owner of a business would spend 1.5 hour on the phone with an account manager, setting up the account.

That's actually a legal requirement in many countries, including the US--either the CEO or CFO of the company must directly deal with a financial institution when setting up a financial institution account (i.e., bank account--note that Paypal is a registered financial institution in nearly all of the jurisdictions in which it operates). My clients run into this all the time. It's a hassle, but it's one you simply have to accept as the cost of doing business in the big leagues.

Want PayPal to transfer british pound to an non-british bank-account, then prepare for a world of pain

Legally, yes. Because British law has rules about this, and as a financial institution Paypal is required to follow those rules. Those rules are deliberately onerous because the type of transaction you are describing was once widely used in tax evasion and money laundering schemes.

> That's actually a legal requirement in many countries, including the US--either the CEO or CFO of the company must directly deal with a financial institution when setting up a financial institution account (i.e., bank account--note that Paypal is a registered financial institution in nearly all of the jurisdictions in which it operates). My clients run into this all the time. It's a hassle, but it's one you simply have to accept as the cost of doing business in the big leagues.

What U.S. law is this?

As we're talking about cross-border bank accounts, the Patriot Act, when applied to foreign persons (individuals or corporations) attempting to open US bank accounts.

Also, FATCA. Though FATCA technically only applies to the financial institutions and not their customers, its information gathering requirements have the same effect as requiring bank customers to disclose certain information.

There are state level laws that may govern US persons attempting to open US bank accounts, both those vary by state.

I'm from Germany and funny enough the ubiquitous online banking infrastructure here was sleeping for decades not providing a simple unified payment solution for their customers, staying dormant while PayPal took all the market.

It was so bad that the only serious contender is now the bank independent "sofortüberweisung.de" which literally MITM's your online banking session and screen scrapes your data while you enter your PINs on their portal (I'm not making this up).

So its a tragedy that you have to support PayPal for us Germans, but in the end the imbeciles in the German banks are to blame.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofortüberweisung

Same boat. Used it for over a decade now, never had an issue. There's plenty of horror stories because so many people use it. Given a big enough size, any company is going to have customers who experienced something bad.

> Why is PayPal not dead?

Because of market saturation. Stripe just recently started an open beta here in Germany. There is Skrill but besides it being relatively unknown, they implemented fees for accounts unused for > 12 months and have generally more fees than paypal (for the consumer)

And because of their consumer focus. I have read many stories about paypal and how their actions made many problems… for businesses. I don't see stories about them fucking over consumers, quite the opposite, they try to err on the side of them.

At least that's my opinion. I probably wouldn't use PayPal should I ever start a business needing a payment processor, but as a consumer? It's awesome.

> At least that's my opinion. I probably wouldn't use PayPal should I ever start a business needing a payment processor, but as a consumer? It's awesome.

No, as a consumer PayPal is a fucking nightmare.

Their customer service makes the stereotypical American DMV look like paradise (I don't live in the US, so I have only the image of the DMV from movies and TV).

Seriously, if you have a problem, just try to get their customer service reps to give half a shit about you and your issue. They'll make you fax (it's 2015...) a million forms to prove your identity and your mother's maiden name and your pet rock's birth certificate, and then tell you that they can't help you with this problem, you'll have to resolve it with the seller.

Their email response time is measured in glacial periods.

Oh, and you want to buy something on eBay and you have some account credit? Well fuck you, you can't pay with PayPal. Your existing payment methods (credit card, direct connection to bank account) don't work. Add a new one, scumbag. Oh, but not one that's already on your account. Nope, we've seen right through your clever trick and won't allow it. In fact, you can't pay with a different credit card that's associated with another PayPal account, because fuck you, that's why.

I finally, after endless hours trying different combinations, figured out that I had to consume the account credit before they would let me use my traditional methods of payment to pay for the transaction.

You might say that you've never had the above problems, and that's fine. You've been incredibly lucky.

I avoid using PayPal now whenever possible. They're the devil reincarnated.

> You might say that you've never had the above problems, and that's fine. You've been incredibly lucky.

Not only that, I never heard of such problems and pretty much everyone I know under 50 uses paypal. That said, it's good to have you horizont broadened :)

But I don't have money on my paypal account anyway, whatever they need they just take directly from my checking account, when an order falls through, I deposit the money back to my account immediately.

I guess pretty much everyone you know doesn't move, then.

You try moving out of the country with a paypal account. They'll make you close your account and open a new one with a different email address. No other way to change country in your billing settings.

Or I guess nobody in your circles cares about security, because that sucks as well. Here is a good write-up about it: http://krebsonsecurity.com/2015/12/2016-reality-lazy-authent...

And their joke of a 2FA doesn't support the standard 2FA/OTP systems.

They're improving, but at a snail's pace. Personally I wouldn't recommend Paypal to anyone. It's not just about whether or not their customers get screwed.

The problem isn't Paypal. The problem is competing sets of laws. You'd have the same problem with a bank, or any startup that cared enough about what it was doing to actually follow financial institution laws.

PayPal makes you create a new account because each country has different requirements for financial institutions and customer data retention. Often times, laws in one country conflict with the laws of another. In some cases, like moving from the US to Europe, under EU laws it would be illegal for Paypal to maintain the US account data, but under US laws it would be illegal for Paypal (as a financial institution) to delete that account data for a period of several years. The KISS solution: just make the customer create a new account, subject to the laws of the jurisdiction they are moving to (and stored in a system compliant with those laws), and transfer any money in the existing account using existing mechanisms with their existing reporting processes that have been sanity-checked thousands of times by prior transactions.

I'd switch to square, but since I don't have a debit card I can't use it. I can still use paypal (and annoy my friends in the process.)

EDIT:

To answer your question, paypal still exists for the same reasons banks exist when people hate them, and for similar reasons to why you'd hire a tour company or local guide when visiting a different country. They are embedded -- they offer increased access via established agreements with more financial entities. They have more mastery of the regulatory landscape than their competitors (especially startups).

Finance is in many ways very traditional business, and paypal has invested in traditional parts of business. I'd bet they employ more lawyers than any other payment startup out there, for example.

What kinds of transactions are you doing? Friendly ones between people you know, selling stuff on CL, eCommerce? I'm curious.

Just paying friends back for dinner and such.

Venmo is your new best friend.

And owned by PayPal.

GFD I had forgotten that.

However unlike the Paypal-branded product, Venmo peer-to-peer payments are free.

Google Wallet?

I use PP for my business. It has been 100% foolproof (survivor bias caveat applies). I have not found another service that does not require me to write code beyond basic html, or to maintain a website.

I am aware of horror stories, and remain interested in alternatives.

Have you looked into Amazon Payments? Also have you taken into account business that you might be losing specifically because you only use PayPal? Again, just asking out of curiosity- I want to know the reasons why PayPal is still being used (both from businesses and from consumers).

Amazon Payments has to be the most under-utilized payment method of the decade. It's insane – everyone and their dog have an Amazon account and you'd have massive user acceptance, yet it's used nowhere.

It must be a well kept secret. Looks like Amazon has one of those slick new web page designs where you have dig down through a few layers in order to find out what the product actually is, but that's OK. They seem to have created something with a strong resemblance to PP in terms of their fee structure and how it's used by a small time merchant like me.

In other words, it might very well be a solution. I know that there is a certain fraction of people who have concluded that they will never use PP again, and I respect that. Offering two different possible payment plans might not add too much more complexity, and might sweep in some of those customers.

PP may have gotten a lot of people early on, when their offerings were a whole lot simpler. My business is really: Take money, ship gadget. No overseas business -- getting a CE mark is too expensive. I didn't look for any kind of API, and have never needed to speak with a human.

There may also be a trust issue (though Amazon is certainly trusted). A lot of merchants complain that PP tends to side with the customer in disputes, which I actually consider to be a good thing since I've never had any disputes.

Stripe Checkout. Here's all the code you need to drop a payments form on your website:

    <form action="/charge" method="POST">
      <script
        src="https://checkout.stripe.com/checkout.js"
        class="stripe-button"
        data-key="pk_test_6pRNASCoBOKtIshFeQd4XMUh"
        data-image="/square-image.png"
        data-name="Demo Site"
        data-description="2 widgets ($20.00)"
        data-amount="2000">
      </script>
    </form>

All that will do is generate a Stripe token. You still need a backend capable of actually charging the token.

PayPal continues to fill a niche of people who want to collect payments with literally no coding.

That's exactly my situation. Oddly enough I love coding, but making it a part of my small business (totally analog product for a tiny niche market) would add a layer of complexity that I'd rather avoid.

I'm a huge fan of Stripe but it's disingenuous to imply that that's literally all you need to do to collect money from someone.

Why is PayPal not dead? My guess is that it works well enough for most people. Gamble that you won't be the one to get your account frozen, and you might be okay. And I guess a lot of companies aren't aware of the risk of doing business with PayPal.

But PayPal exists primarily because there's no reliable international internet payment infrastructure that allows direct payment from one real bank account to the other. We've for a system for that in Netherland, and every Dutch webshop uses it, but works only for payments within the country. We need something like that on an international scale.

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