Paypal to Force Sellers to Give It Equal Representation as Payment | Hacker News Reader

Paypal to Force Sellers to Give It Equal Representation as Payment

paypal.com

41 pointsgscott45 comments

I guess this is in relation to the following clause?

In representations to your customers or in public communications, you agree not to mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method. At all of your points of sale (in whatever form), you agree not to try to dissuade or inhibit your customers from using PayPal; and, if you enable your customers to pay you with PayPal, you agree to treat PayPal’s payment mark at least at par with other payment methods offered.

So my interpretation is that this is to avoid merchants from pushing cheaper payment methods by saying negative things about PayPal or making it harder to find or use. I'm not sure this is as dramatic as the title makes out. Am I missing something?

>you agree not to try to dissuade or inhibit your customers from using PayPal

so charging extra fees or not giving a discount to paypal customers is also not okay?

> > you agree not to try to dissuade or inhibit your customers from using PayPal

I know quite a lot of sites that tack on $1 for using PayPal. I'll also only use PayPal for sites I've never used before because buyer protection.

This is akin to my bank freezing my accounts because I gave them a bad review online.

I would love to see them try to enforce this. *If a brick and mortar bank tried this there would be a run on their accounts so fast it would make Usain Bolt blush.

As a seller, you don't have a choice. You can:

* Accept PayPal, and play ball with their policies.

* Disparage them, and get your account seized.

* Not accept PayPal, and lose out on millions of customers.

Please don't say BitCoin is an alternative. Unless you're selling heroin, or your entire customer base consists of crypto-anarcho-libertarians, it's not.

* Use alternative payment systems.

Equivalent to #3. There are a lot of people who only use PayPal online. In the HN space? Probably not that many. If you're selling shirts or random widgets online? The GP is not exaggerating by saying that literally millions of people will get to payment, see they have to type in a CC number and that PP is not an option, and they will leave.

for the most part if you use EBAY you really don't have much of a choice and as a buyer ebay pushes paypal

You're forgetting the network effects, my friend. They can get away with this because they already have people locked in.

This is what legislation is for. There's always a bigger fish.

What little competition they have is worse. Credit cards are probably on the path to the root of 'evil' for this form of (seller and) consumer abuse.

There are some parallels with rules of brick and mortar banks for credit card acquiring; at least in certain markets stating that you'd give a discount for paying cash instead of card or discouraging card payments in other ways would put you on a track to get blacklisted from accepting any credit cards at all.

Doesn't this say that even when PayPal provides a sub-par service, you as a seller offering PayPal checkout, must treat and advertise them as equivalently as companies that provide a better/cheaper service?

No, it's to stop you saying 'i accept paypal and _____, but I prefer _____.'

I think the rate hikes are more interesting. They also recently removed the volume discounts from Paypal Pro...they used to be significantly cheaper than Stripe (2.2% vs 2.9%, assuming reasonable volume). This is no longer the case.

The change will affect some vendors though. Internet.bs, a popular domain registrar, currently hides Paypal behind a "more payment options" button. This will force them to stop that.

Maybe. Maybe not. Internet.bs may choose to remove Paypal altogether if they have better methods.

That's just another variation of "stop that" though.

> you agree not to mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method.

Anyone else intrigued by that statement? WTH is PayPal if not a payment method? Are they trying to avoid PayPal being just an option in a list of choices?

I think that is as a payment method when compared to other payment methods.

If you're a Payments Pro merchant, you've been required to offer PayPal Express checkout prominently for some time now. I suspect this move is because the fees are going up enough to encourage businesses to leave but still leave PayPal for the customers who prefer it..

We are changing the currency conversion spread charged when we perform a currency conversion for you from charging an additional 2.5% over the exchange rate set by our bank to charging an additional 3.0%

And their bank's exchange rate is not great to start with. Against the rate Google or XE shows, our PayPal conversions seem to work out at around 3% as it is. So now that'll be about 3.5%. Add the other 0.2% increase on cross border payments and the 2% merchant rate we already pay.. and it's nice work if you can get it! :-D

Are you looking at Android Pay or other alternatives? It seems like the web payments API is going somewhere. It looks like there should be significantly fewer fees; Zooz at least claims to not have any cross-border or transaction fees.

I'm guessing these lower fees are part of why Uber and Seamless were offering discounts when using Android Pay.

[EDIT]: It's disappointing that Android Pay goes through the credit card system when making payments; I was pretty happy that PayPal bypassed the credit card duopoly.

We're looking at using Stripe more. (We already use it because PayPal won't support Amex in the UK.) But no, a lot of systems are not ideal because we are mostly doing mid 4 and low 5 figure B2B transactions (many use wire transfer but a lot of people in companies have credit cards they can use more easily).

Paypal tries very hard to encourage customers to pay them for conversion. Clearly an example of hostile UI.

For the longest time it wouldn't save your currency conversion settings.

Most banks of CC companies will also be charging you similar rates, unfortunately.

This is why it is a pity bitcoin didn't go mainstream.

Bitcoin will take off when global c2b gets more reliable and more used (aliexpress is the beginning)

> In representations to your customers or in public communications, you agree not to mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method. At all of your points of sale (in whatever form), you agree not to try to dissuade or inhibit your customers from using PayPal; and, if you enable your customers to pay you with PayPal, you agree to treat PayPal’s payment mark at least at par with other payment methods offered.

PayPal has become needy and will only play with you if you say nice things about it and don't like any of your other friends better than PayPal. Oh and PayPal is adding 8 different ways to take more of your money.

That's cheeky... AFAIK PayPal does absolutely jack shit for sellers other than give them the money they rightfully earned... sometimes

Now they demand equal representation?

I'm no PayPal apologist, but would you say the same thing about American Express about "demanding equal representation?" It makes sense that PayPal doesn't want its sellers to basically say "please use any of these other ten methods of payment, but as a last resort if you have to use PayPal fine I guess you can."

I don't see a problem with requiring people who accept PayPal not to talk out of both sides of their mouth by simultaneously accepting it and trying to discourage it.

Perhaps, as an alternate approach to the problem, they could consider changing their own business practices so that companies didn't feel the need to persuade customers not to use PayPal.

Ie, if companies didn't despise you for treating them so poorly, they probably wouldn't be so inclined to bad mouth you.

Yes, "don't be shitty" is obvious the suggestion most people would have. That's sort of ignoring the point though.

But it isn't. It is the root of their problem, making it exactly the point.

You're right, though, in the sense that the advice won't be followed. It's too obvious and not convoluted enough to make sense to businesspeople

It's more than that. PayPal now requires that "you agree to treat PayPal’s payment mark at least at par with other payment methods offered".

That means the seller's PayPal button and logo must be at least as prominent as any other payment method offered.

For me (a reluctant PayPal user at best), that's asking too much.

  > PayPal doesn't want its sellers to basically say "please use any of these other ten methods of payment, but as a last resort if you have to use PayPal fine I guess you can."

If they don't want people to do that then they can offer a quality of service that does not cause people to disparage them.

What I really don't understand is, why can't PayPal just fix what everyone hates about it?

Question for the legal eagles out there, would sarcasm count toward not violating this clause?

For example, if an e-commerce site adds a line on it's checkout page that says, "Please make sure to use Paypal so I can pay them fees on par with a card network yet run the risk of them hanging on to my money indefinitely with no legal recourse outside of arbitration".

Yeah, this is why I used Paypal exactly once. They are over the top creepy control freaks who want access to all of your money, even as a buyer. There are lots of horror stories about their return policies, etc. Paypal is at least as bad as Wells Fargo or Bank of America. Something about handling other people's money makes organizations act this way, I guess.

Of course, I'm a buyer, not a seller, so it's not like they have the same leverage over me.

> Something about handling other people's money makes organizations act this way, I guess.

The answer to that question is typically fraud. If you could provide cheaper and better customer service than PayPal, and stay solvent, you'd stand to make billions of dollars.

I don't have much sympathy for them, but the industry they operate in is a nightmare.

All of the fees go up while the buyer & seller protections get additional restrictions... It's a lose/lose for PayPal customers.

I'm altering the deal. Pray that I don't alter it any further.

Paypal is risky for sellers because you face two levels of fraud vector from fraudulent buyers. Even if you abide by all of Paypal's requirements, if the underlying bank/network does a chargeback, Paypal takes your money (plus a fee, so you've lost the full value of the item plus your shipping cost plus an additional Paypal fee).

For buyers, in cases where they are on the hook because they were defrauded, they have been known to throw up ludicrous barriers to refunds. I had a case where they insisted they had "proof of delivery" of a never-received item... and the tracking data they provided as "proof" showed a destination in another state.

What if you merely listed the fees next to the payment types? Surely, that doesn't count as disparaging.

Also, many vendors add a surcharge for Amex/Diners use. Wouldn't it be legitimate to do the same with PayPal?

A surcharge would not be legitimate, https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full#...

"No surcharges

You agree that you will not impose a surcharge or any other fee for accepting PayPal as a payment method. You may charge a handling fee in connection with the sale of goods or services as long as the handling fee does not operate as a surcharge and is not higher than the handling fee you charge for non-PayPal transactions." is probably as clear as it can be. You can list the different fees you would charge the customer for different payment types, but the paypal fee must be (tied for) lowest.

Funny, since Paypal charges their own customers more for Amex transactions. Do as I say, not as I do.

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/merchant-fees

"American Express® card usage fees: 3.5% per transaction on PayPal Payments Pro, PayPal Payments Advanced and Virtual Terminal"

Yes, Amex doesn't have such a condition, and that's their choice to make - linked with their choice to charge much higher fees than Visa or Mastercard.

I see no hypocrisy there, simply Paypal and Amex have different pricing strategies. In the exact same manner, a merchant would be expected to explicitly charge a higher fee for taking Amex directly than for taking Paypal.

Perhaps equally or more interesting, what does one suppose is the effect of the following?

> We are adding the ability to create a negative balance in your PayPal account when we reverse a payment to cover eBay buyer protection claims that the seller loses.

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