Comment by omfg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by omfg | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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

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.

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.

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