I was going to register PayPalSucks.com...
bradleyjoyce.com
bradleyjoyce.com
Considering how many billions of transactions PayPal handles per month, the rate of complaints on sites like PayPalSucks.com is actually enormously small. The forums you mention haven't had a post in over a week, while millions of PayPal transactions occurred. By most standards they have a very good record for such a large company.
I've been using PayPal since June 2000, so almost 10 years now. It is the primary payment method chosen by my customers, doing over 40,000 individual transactions so far. I've dealt with just about every country PayPal operates in, have seen at least one instance of every type of fraud/chargeback/reversal/complaint possible, yet I've never had any type of problem with the account. I also get a human being on the phone as soon as I call, and e-mails get a response in about a business day.
Considering that they do a lot of the fraud detection work for you, charge no fees on refunds and reversals, dispute chargebacks on your behalf, AND charge less than many MOTO merchant accounts (after you add up all the AVS fees, statement fees, ACH fees, batch fees, gateway fees, recurring billing service fees, downgrade fees, etc etc), they're quite a nice company to do business with really.
This post paints PayPal as some kind of crime syndicate with no customer service, yet I don't think the author has had the experience to say such a thing. The mere existence of a site which originated long before PayPal was even owned by eBay is not evidence of some kind of mass corruption. Last time I had a problem (someone sent several $1 payments to my account then disputed them all the same day -- I had no clue why), I called up the customer service number. I didn't have to go through any kind of phone tree, the call was answered by a nice woman (with no foreign accent, for those who care about such things). She had empathy for my situation, she joked about how odd that was a bit, she looked at the transactions and closed the disputes for me, and I was able to simply refund the person the random $1 payments myself.
Just a few months ago I had some very specific questions about the impact of adding and removing Website Payments Pro service from a PayPal account. I used e-mail that time, through the "contact us" link on every page of the PayPal site. Every question was answered, in detail, the next business day. Not ignored, no form letter response.
I don't see how they could do customer service any better.
1. Bank transfers to India have been frozen since 27 Jan at least (Not personal exp, other people exp on various forums). The first communications from Paypal was 6th Feb, when the shitstorm was already out.
2. I have ~45KUSD with Paypal, which I cant withdraw right now. There had been no email sent to me. All I can read is their Paypal blog.
3. I had a withdrawal initiated around 6 Feb. This withdrawal was reversed, Still no email was sent to me.
4. I have been in touch with Paypal support, and while the response has always been. "Yeah you cant withdraw, we are sorry, and we wont give you any timeline when you can do that".
5. On 9th Feb. tha paypal blog said "Customers should be able to withdraw their funds to a local bank within the next few days." This has still not been made available. (As of my communication with support yesterday). I have no idea what to expect of the phrase "next few days."
6. The Paypal blog post was commentless for the last few days,(which has been only channel of public communication), they did not publish or answer my comments. Here is a a screenshot, http://www.ubuntu-pics.de/bild/42471/screenshot_019_w06Yk5.p... whether this is insulting, inflamatory etc, is left to your imagination.
7. In response to my question to support of whether the suspension is a "regulatory or technical issue", they responed its a technical issue.
I am still willing to believe that it is a regulatory issue which is hurting them, the absokute lack of transparency and communication is absolutely unfogivable. If github goes down for an hour we expect them to keep a 15 minute-updated status blog statins what is the issue, and what they are trying to resolve that. WHy is it unreasionable to expect this of Paypal.
I have ~45K with Paypal, which as a 25 yo Indian is quote a bit to me. (Its more than what I have ever kept at one bank at one time ever.), so I obvioulsy trusted Paypal a lot. This time they have proved themselves entirely incapable of keeping that trust to me. Paypal is still convinient enough that I will accept them, but you can be sure I am not gonna be advocating or having them as my first preference.
Right now to me paypal is evil
The lesson you should take away has to be that you shouldn't treat a payment processor like a bank and hold $45,000 there. Doing business is in part about assessing risk, and holding all your money in a PayPal account should've jumped out as a major risk even without this situation.
As I said,
1. Paypal support said it is technical, not a regulatory issue. Their blog only confirms it only personal transfers being a regulatory issue. They have stopped all transactions, including my business account, which accepted no personal transaction.
2. In spite of their saying otherwise I am willing to believe it is a regulatory issue, my major issue is with their absolute lack of transparency and willingness to commit too any timeline.
> The lesson you should take away has to be that you shouldn't treat a payment processor like a bank and hold $45,000 there. Doing business is in part about assessing risk, and holding all your money in a PayPal account should've jumped out as a major risk even without this situation.
1. Totally agree that I failed in accessing risk, however Paypal is classified as bank in a number of jurisdictions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal#Bank_status . I hope you would agree that this behavior should be enough grounds t revoke their bank status?
2. Its not all my money, though quite a significant percentage of it. However, I am assuming that there a quite a number of people in India whose weekly transaction is > 45K$, so holding that in a Paypal account is not really unheard of.
While there are several thousand success stories like yours, there are several thousand fail stories like this guys. I agree that PayPal wouldn't be around if their failures were greater than their successes. The issue is that when they fail they tend to fail in a big way which affects businesses and individuals greatly. If you read the stories, they all have the same underlying theme. PayPal selects account for review (random process no problems on the account before hand), requests additional documentation, freezes funds/ability to receive funds while conducting this review, wait several days, and finally PayPal responds back sorry we find you are a high fraud rate (or other similar reasoning), account closed, wait 180 days (6 months) to receive any money in your account. During this period it appears PayPal does not bother to respond to you via email or phone and when they do you get a mixed answer.
If this ever happened to me I would be a little pissed as well. I have had a PayPal account for over 8 years myself and have never had a problem. I send and receive money just fine all the time. I did have a customer several years ago that this happened to though. While we were waiting on PayPal to respond, I did some digging and that is when I started seeing the same story over and over again.
My customer sold computer equipment, he was doing large volumes of over $2000 or $3000 a day. Never had a complaint, chargeback, reversal, etc... Receives an email one night at around 3am EST stating that the volume on his account had triggered a fraud alert in PayPal fraud division. They immediately froze all funds in his account (luckily it was only like $5000, as he always made a point to transfer funds out each day or two) and stopped his ability to send/receive. The requested all kinds of additional documentation (shipping files, incorporation paperwork, tax returns). He faxed it all over within 1 day of receiving the notice. They responded that they would get back to him within 5 business days. In the meantime he still could not send/receive or withdraw funds. At the end of day 3 he received an email from them that stated their fraud department had determined his risk was too high and that his account would be closed. His money would be transferred in 180 days to his bank account on record. He tried calling, got a very nice guy on the phone who tried to help him, but still to no avail. It was like once it was stuck in "fraud review" it was destined to be closed. Again, no chargeback, reversal, refund, etc... started this, simply a random fraud review. Long story short he involved his attorney, attorney wrote a little letter to PayPal, sent certified mail, and within 3 days of them signing the letter, his money miraculously appeared in his bank account.
Anyway, sorry for my rambling. I agree with you that PayPal provides a wonderful service, and anytime I have ever had a problem it was resolved quickly and efficiently. But I have seen the other side of the coin as well and it appears that there is one department within PayPal (fraud/complaince) that appears to run afoul of the rest of the company and thus generate a large number of complaints.
The situation you described of having an account closed due to fraud problems, funds held for 180 days, and no help during that time is the same experience they'd have with a merchant account anywhere else. The policies are exactly the same, because they trickle down from the card associations themselves -- more than 1% chargeback rate, or a categorization as a high risk business due to what's being sold, and the MAP is bound to close the account and hold payments for 6 months or their own ability to process credit cards becomes at risk with Visa and MasterCard.
I've actually gone through that with a normal merchant account underwritten by a bank. My experience with PayPal has been much more pleasant, though I expect they would do no less if for some reason they classified me as high risk. They have the same obligations to Visa/MasterCard as anyone else doing payment processing does.
* Only support for USA.
* Supports countries outside USA too, but not enough.
* Does not support enough payment methods. Supporting only credit cards is not acceptable, plenty of people don't have credit cards.
* Not convenient enough or too confusing for customers. For example, requiring registration is a big no-no. People don't want to register, they just want to buy my product. Even credit card validation - where the customer has to wait a few days for the credit card to be verified - is too much of a hassle.
* Too expensive for the customer. If you're selling $10 gadgets then the $20 international wire transfer fees will scare away all your customers.
* Too expensive for the merchant. I'm not willing to pay $100 per month for a merchant account if I don't know up front how much I'll sell. I'd prefer if they take a small percentage of revenue instead so that I at least can't lose any money.
Been using it for years and years and years. It has not sucked for me.. except once. But then again, my bank sucks. Amazon sucks as a payment system. Google sucks as a payment system.
Thing is, so many people use Paypal, and its indecently convenient, that you end up living with the suckage.
Just like that crappy car you have that sucks. You get out of bed one morning, the very time that you need it to go to that new job, and it wont start. Ugh! You get it fixed, then it works like a charm for the next 8 months. Then it sucks again.
These PayPal suxx horror stories are true. But they are few and far between. I don't see less people using Paypal because of those stories. I see more. Putting them out there is good because PayPal will hopefully pay attention.
But stop griping and get a decent alternative to paypal, and NO, what you are about to suggest is not a decent alternative, unless it works exactly like paypal and all my friends and employees use it.