PayPal adds “non-discouragement” clause to their User Agreement | Hacker News Reader

PayPal adds “non-discouragement” clause to their User Agreement

paypal.com

107 pointsstriking94 comments

«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.»

If you have to add that to your User Agreement, what does that say about your service?

I read that regarding all your PoS that Paypal is about to enter into direct competition with e.g. Apple Pay and others.

Also, I read that they will raise costs soonish.

"you agree not to mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method"

English is not my first language, does this mean that by calling PayPal a "payment method" i mischaracterize it? (is it a .. payment service .. whatever?) Or does it mean that I agree not to "mischaracterize" PayPal in general because I don't like it? (then why would I offer it)

I was confused by this language too. I think it means that in the context of PayPal being a payment method, you agree not to mischaracterize it in any way.

English is my first language and I find the wording confusing as well.

Your english is good. It's very unclear what it means as the sentence can be parsed different ways. That suggests that either their lawyers are incompetent and shouldn't be let near a contract, or they are are competent and therefore are intentionally trying to fool their customers.

It's probably incompetence though since this can work both ways. If PayPal tried to bring legal action with this clause, the first defense one would look at is to simply respond, "Where did I say it was a payment method? The clause says I can't mischaracterize it as a payment method, and I didn't."

In any case as it reads most simply it says you can't call PayPal a payment method. I doubt that's what they really meant to say.

It can only be parsed different ways under incompatible assumptions about whether PayPal is a payment method.

If it actually is a payment method (as their lawyers undoubtedly take as a given), then it limits mischaracterization to aspects of PayPal that do not involve its character as a payment method.

Only if you already believe it is somehow "not a payment method" does the other reading make any sense.

I also interpreted it as "PayPal is not a payment method" when reading. Legal statements shouldn't rely on out-of-contract context to parse

IANAL, but it's not exactly "out-of-contract." The term "payment method" appears 49 times in the User Agreement[1].

Having said that, a quick skim suggests the term is used inconsistently. Sometimes it refers to PayPal as a payment method, other times it refers to the information you enter into PayPal (ie credit card, bank account, etc) as payment methods. This is because PayPal is both a payment method itself and a wrapper service for many payment methods. For example:

  Your PayPal balance, if you used your PayPal balance as the payment method or a bank account as the payment method, once the money clears the bank.

So while it is confusing, I don't think you'd get very far with the "PayPal is not a payment method" interpretation.

1: https://www.paypalobjects.com/webstatic/ua/pdf/US/en_US/ua.p...

That is not correct. When one contracting party is in a superior position, courts consistently rule against the drafter of the agreement when there is ambiguous language. It's a long held legal principle taught in contract classes at law school.

Glad to hear that.

They ordinarily don't. A normal contract - and most EULAs, even - include explicit definitions before a term is used repeatedly.

e.g. The party receiving payment ("seller") shall...

This one didn't.

This is de rigeur in payments; the brand guidelines for the big three credit card companies have similar things IIRC. They don't want you to say "Visa accepted here THOSE BASTARDS we prefer Amex" or otherwise interfere with their customer relationships while servicing your customer relationships.

There has been litigation around this routinely, including (IIRC) a US holding that says that merchants are allowed to say X is cheaper for them than Y if that statement is accurate.

Edit: that may have been reversed on appeal. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-26/american-...

Maybe it's only my anecdotal experience, but I've seen a lot more merchants lately flat out stop accepting expensive payment methods like Amex, and these were all merchants that I had previously been able to use Amex at before.

Amex is in a bit of trouble for a few reasons:

1. Competing card companies offer much better cards than they used to, and include benefits that only Amex used to provide. For example, Visa Signature and Mastercard's competing product offer return coverage, extended warranties, free rental car insurance, etc.

2. One of the main draws of accepting Amex was that Amex's customer base was more affluent than that of other card companies, but that is no longer the case, partly because of #1.

3. Amex lost the Costco deal. That's a loss of a great deal of credit card fees, and 10% of Amex cards were the Costco card.

The court case was also seen as a blow, but maybe not if it got reversed on appeal. In any case, there are plenty of other problems for Amex to worry about.

Oh for sure! I myself no longer feel like I'm getting as much value from my $450/year Platinum charge card with Amex and am looking to switch to the Chase Sapphire Reserve card, as it's a visa (taken everywhere), has a better rewards program, and provides far more services for that same $450/year annual fee.

I have yet to find any credit card that's worth paying a fee for at all. What do (did) you get for either of those cards that's worth more than $450/year, that you can't get with a $0/year card?

They reimburse me $200/year in airline expenses (I use Southwest primarily, so I just buy Southwest gift cards which get reimbursed, and use them for flights), reimburse me for global entry every few years, top tier status at Hertz, Hilton, and Starwood, free Boingo account, free access to Amex lounges in a few major airports, rental car insurance coverage, etc.

http://thepointsguy.com/2016/01/maximizing-amex-platinum-in-...

I'm old and busy; I'll pay for covenience in life, which is why I've kept the card up to this point.

EDIT: Almost forgot: I have had the need to pay for a friend to be airlifted out of a central american country due to a medical emergency, and Amex was the only card willing to auth a low five figure amount with just a phone call to pay the helicopter fee. I have yet to find another financial provider who'll do that.

I'll probably get them if I keep up my level of travel, the free tsa pre-check, airline expense reimbursement, and benefits at hotels (free spa treatments etc) alone pay for the annual fee.

There is a major high-end hotel chain that has a $495-fee card with similar benefits to those stated for the AMEX card above. And if there are two ways to get something like that, there's probably a third.

fwiw the lounge access on the CSR card is nowhere as good as the amex, as you have to pay for anyone travelling with you. The CSR is comparable, but there are definitely trade offs.

This is good to know! Thank you!

I can't comment on the selection quality, but the Priority Pass which comes with the CSR is good for yourself and one guest. I've used is several times with my partner and no fees were charged.

Sapphire reserve gives you at least $1,500 up front if you spend $4k in first 3 months, and you get at least 4.5% back on restaurant and travel for a card that costs $130 per year assuming you use travel credit and global entry.

For many people traveling and eating out, the 4.5% will easily cover the $130 expense and so you easily make up the yearly fee.

There are several $0/year cards that give you back 2% on every purchase, so in comparison Saphire card gives you 2.5% on travel/restaurants and -0.5% on everything else.

That's why I don't use sapphire reserve for stuff other than travel and restaurant.

> What do (did) you get for either of those cards that's worth more than $450/year, that you can't get with a $0/year card?

I have a Barclays Aviator (old US Airways, now American Airlines) card, and although it has a $195/yr annual fee, I get $100 back for renewing my Global Entry card. This is in an addition to free checked baggage on American Airlines flights and group 1 boarding.

I usually fly enough that it pays for itself with the bag fees alone. The extra 1 year warranty on purchases has also saved me as well.

The other nice thing about Barclays is that as far as I know they're still the only issuer of credit cards to US customers which will actually do chip-and-PIN (as opposed to chip-and-signature on every other credit card in the US). Which means when you're traveling you can use that card at places which only do chip-and-PIN.

This is going to sound like an advertisement but I don't know a better way to state it.

Chase reserve is 300 back in "travel" expenses which include parking/tolls/flights/uber. Assuming you have any of those expenses, it's a 150 card. Redeeming points is 1.5x more value if done through the reserve, travel/restaurants give 3x points. If you spend 4k a year on restaurants/travel, you'll break even.

So why get it if I have to spend >4k to break even? Because there is (was?) a 100,000 point signup bonus worth 1000 dollars cash or 1500 dollars in flights/more if transferred for a ticket. I'll break even on the yearly fee just from flights that I'm taking so it's 1000 dollars for "free".

If you're a chase ultimate rewards user, you should have the csr for the 1.5x redemption. If you like free money, you should have the csr and meet the spending requirement for the bonus.

By fiddling with credit cards, I'll save over 3k this year while traveling. There are people who do far, far more.

I've got a Gold Amex and a Chase Sapphire, and both pay for themselves each year. Between the monthly/quarterly recurring charges associated with running a startup off your credit cards, travel, and monthly expenses (groceries, gas, etc) we get way more in kickbacks than our yearly fees.

The important thing is that we're not going out of our way to justify the cards, we're simply operating our household expenses the same way we would be on a $0 card.

The difference is we use our points to buy everyone in our family pnice Christmas gifts, can get pre-sale access to shows/concerts (that is admittedly underutilized now that we have three kids), access to airport lounges, double up on hotel points, get discounted airfare upgrades, and things like expense categorization in the web portal. We get frequent discount offers for things we normally purchase, instant alerts for weird transactions that I can handle from my phone.

For us it pencils out. For someone or a family without the recurring expenses we have and doesn't travel very often, it wouldn't be worth it.

People already listed some of the perks, but: in general you choose a card based on things you already are doing (flights, hotels, etc.) so that the perks of the card are worth as much or usually more than the annual fee you pay to keep the card.

For people who travel a lot, for example, an annual travel credit + Global Entry fee covered + lounge access + redeemable points from spending on the card provides much, much more than $450 in value. Back when I flew more than I do now, several of the available cards had returns for me well above the cost of their annual fees.

Just a generic piece of life advice here: you can call up your credit card company and get the annual fee waved, for degrees of difficulty generally south of e.g. getting a bank to waive an overdraft fee. They want their plastic in your wallet if you have a premium card; the most direct incentive is interchange and/or interest and the other one is "We probabilistically pay $X00 [+] to find a new customer of uncertain quality; this bird-in-the-hand is of known quality; let's keep them happy."

[+] Cost of customer acquisition in credit cards is $250 on the low end.

> Just a generic piece of life advice here: you can call up your credit card company and get the annual fee waved, for degrees of difficulty generally south of e.g. getting a bank to waive an overdraft fee.

Interesting. Would you consider it feasible to do so for a card you don't have yet (i.e. obtaining a new card without its associated annual fee), or would you only consider that plausible as an existing customer of such a card?

And does that apply to the large vendors (such as Amex or Chase), or only to smaller ones?

Most people who do it call after they're already using the card. The waivers are generally one-off but some people get a one-off waiver like clockwork every year they ask for it.

I am unaware of any CC issuer in the US of any size or segment which, as a matter of policy, refuses all requests of this matter. It comes down to policies and often a judgment call by a line cSR.

I pay for my amex and it pays for itself within the first couple months of each year. Great points structure and the fact that they pay airline baggage fees makes it a no brainier.

My last several apartments have all allowed me to pay my rent with a card. Which is nice, because it's been easy to hit the spend thresholds of premium cards and kick in all the good benefits.

Since I switched a while back from flying American to flying Delta, I looked into getting Delta's branded card, which is Amex... except my current apartment doesn't take Amex for rent payments. So I'd be unable to hit the thresholds to make the card pay for itself.

So that's the big three credit card companies disrupting PayPal, basically.

Part of it seems to be saying you can't charge people extra fees to use paypal.

I know sellers sometimes try to do the same thing with credit cards, charge extra fees to credit card users.

I usually just do the opposite. I mark everything up knowing that somewhere a cut will be taken.

If you have to pay me cash, then I just make more on that transaction.

If you're able to sell something at the same rate with an increased price, you should've been doing that before you heard about the credit cards' cut.

You're forgetting the convenience factor that the payment service creates in the market.

Let's say I sell trinkets for $10/each online. They are nice trinkets, but no one really needs my trinkets. No one is going to send me a money order in the mail for a single trinket for $10. Basically, there is no online market at all, unless I can make it easy to buy my product.

But if I charge $11/each and accept Paypal (or credit cards in general), I now have a real market for my trinkets. People like my trinkets, so they will gladly click on a Paypal icon and send me the money that way.

Now my trinkets are somewhat popular. A couple times a year someone stops by my workshop and asks to buy a trinket in person. I still charge them $11.

Could I try to get around this by offering two "different" (sharpie a red dot on the bottom of the lamp) items, one you can purchase with paypal and another you cannot. Can Paypal require you to accept paypal on everything your business sells?

Well, if I can't "mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method" then how can I "treat PayPal's payment mark at least at par with other payment methods offered"? Their use of "other payment methods" would imply to me that they consider PayPal also to be a "payment method" though I suppose they might want to call it Bob instead.

I can just see it now: "PayPal is not a legitimate payment method! If you doubt this, see their Terms & Conditions where they explicitly state that you may not 'mischaracterize PayPal as a payment method.'"

Someone did a really crappy job of phrasing.

>> Someone did a really crappy job of phrasing.

Legal work is an area of life where one should not apply Hanlon's razor by default. Not one comma or period in that work went unscrutinized by highly compensated executive talent at PayPal and any ambiguity you find is deliberate. Assume malice.

This can't be understated.

My wife is a mid-tier firm attorney in (a field). Any contract generally has a low-level associate take a pass at the material, which she then scrutinizes, polishes, etc. and then shares with her supervising attorney, who also scrutinizes and polishes. This is then shared with the client, who has their own staff to scrutinize, who are relevant executives, content experts, and often in-house attorneys of their own.

Several iterations of this cycle are the bare minimum. Because this process involves low-tier associates being taught by upper level attorneys, the "basic" stuff that top experts take for granted gets scrutinized and explained, as well, so even the parts you think of as "stock components" are being carefully looked over and considered at length.

There isn't a single word in those contracts that hasn't been reviewed by at least a half-dozen experts.

It's still an ambiguous construction in the middle of a standard form contract, which is bad news for whoever drafted the contract in many legal systems. And from my experience of lawyers, highly paid or otherwise, incompetence is just as plausible an explanation for their bad work as anyone else's.

I'll note that what we're all reading is not changes to the User Agreement - it's a summary of coming changes. I went looking, and as far as I can tell the actual revised agreement is not currently available on PayPal's website - only the agreement currently in effect and this summary of coming changes.

In fact, we do not get to see the actual changes to the legalese until they go into effect, or that's how I'd read the current agreement (emphasis added by me): "We may amend this user agreement at any time by posting a revised version on our website. The revised version will be effective at the time we post it. If we change the user agreement in a way that reduces your rights or increases your responsibilities, we will provide you with 30 days’ prior notice by posting notice on the Policy Updates page of our website."

So apparently we get to see vague and/or possibly misleading summaries and make our decisions based on those, but we do not get to see the actual text prior to deciding. I originally had hopes that we'd get to see it around the end of February (~30 days before it goes into effect), but the statement I italicized above indicates that we don't.

I think they mean mischaracterising PayPal in its capacity as a payment method, rather than mischaracterising PayPal to be a payment method.

I'm amazed people will still use Paypal. The horror stories about it are legion online; I had my own, many years ago, when I did some editing work for someone who then disputed the charge on their credit card. Paypal then retroactively decided that I had a negative balance on my account!

At the time I was young and stupid and idealistic and principled enough to waste a lot of time suing Paypal and the collections agency in small claims court (suing anyone in small claims court can be a pretty bad idea, even if you are technically in the right: https://jakeseliger.com/2010/08/28/dont-rent-an-apartment-fr... , if your time and attention are worth anything). Still, I did definitely, definitively learn that you cannot trust and should not use Paypal.

As a customer I very much prefer PayPal. If site supports PayPal as payment method, this increases the propability of getting my money.

CC is more cumbersome, because I don't want to give my primary credit card info for random merchants and creating new virtual card takes a few steps.

Visa Checkout is, just 20 years too late, finally attempting to solve this problem. I'm way more copacetic about Visa have access to my account information since they already do :)

The card companies are shockingly glacial in this market. You'd think the day after Ebay and PP came online, they'd be working on an online card solution. It would have encouraged people to spend billions more on their cards and they've crushed PP in the cradle.

Hardly surprising, entrenched behemoths are always slow to innovate and resistant to change. It's just the law. Ironically, eBay and PayPal themselves now suffer from this.

See, I personally do the exact opposite of that. PayPal has caused me more fraudulent bank activity than CC (it may help that my only CC is the debit/credit card from my bank account). So I'll give my CC over the web, knowing that I will know about any fraud when the transaction hits, and I can call the bank immediately - plus I know what retailer specifically did it rather than "PayPal".

I've used PayPal to take payments for my side business, for upwards of a decade -- well over 1000 sales. I've never had a single glitch.

Every once in a while, I look into alternative services. So far, PayPal is the only service that lets me run my business using a static web page. They provide the checkout system and handle the card payment for me.

If I use Stripe, I have to create and maintain some kind of active server to process the transactions. With other services, there's always something that makes it onerous to use.

In the long run, I think the buyer protections are more of a benefit than a risk to me. They reassure the customer that I won't screw with their credit card number, or just vanish overnight with no recourse to them.

Note that as a manufacturer, my cost-of-goods is a small fraction of the selling price, so my risk is less than someone using PayPal for a pure cash transaction such as getting paid for work. Also, a physical good that can be returned kind of sets the bar for any customer who wants to hassle me.

So far, the only disputes I've received have been when somebody orders my gadget by accident, and enters a dispute so I can cancel the transaction.

You can set up a web hook somewhere. https://www.webscript.io is "unlimited" for $5/mo, and AWS Lambda probably also works.

That's still more work than it takes to serve a static web page. Plus, you have to be a programmer.

Indeed. In fact, I'm an avid programmer, but I'm not a programmer of that stuff. And I'm somewhat fearful of doing it wrong and creating some kind of massive security nightmare for myself or for my customers.

There's services like http://moltin.com , snipcart, and Stripe now has Stripe.js which I believe can handle payments 100% client side as well.

what was the outcome of your small claims suit vs. paypal? settlement? were you reasonably satisfied with the outcome in the end?

PP froze my account. (concentrated buyer exposure) They asked me what im selling, i said i offer software services , they asked what is the product , what do i deliver, i said i deliver code , they asked for the service agreement, i said well you'd have to ask the buyer that. They asked me to send them the last 4 invoices , i did. long story short , It was PITA to refund my bread , getting paid with STRIPE is better now. WHAT a damn hassle! I got the buyer on the phone W/ PP.PP said to me only thing i can do i is refund the last 4 invoices and get paid outside PP. Buyer said there is NO issue at all we are very happy with seller services. PP said to buyer: "nothing you did or can do". PP said to " they'd hold my bread for 180 days" then said hold for 90 days OR i can refund the 4 invoices , each time i called i spoke to someone different, they said it was their system, not my fault or the buyer , buyer made no claims at all.. Luckily, the buyer was cool enough to help me. I had to call PP each time todo a refund. Lift HOLD, refund, with then on the phone, repeat. What a damn HASSLE! i set up stripe the next day and its all good to go now! good lucky with PP. they can hold your shit without informing you and you can't do jack shit. And i had people to pay! I am kinda pissed but happy i got paid all my invoices. Does this mean i can't write a blog post about what happ to me? maybe this type of shit is normal with PP.

Write a blog post but use few paragraphs ;) the story is interesting but difficult to read.

dyslexia. ;-)

PayPal froze my account (for concentrated buyer exposure). They asked me what I'm selling, I said I offer software services. They asked what is the product, what do I deliver, I said I deliver code. They asked for the service agreement, I said "well, you'd have to ask the buyer for that". They asked me to send them the last 4 invoices, so I did. Long story short, it was PITA to refund my bread.

Getting paid with STRIPE is better now. WHAT a damn hassle! I got the buyer on the phone with PayPal. PayPal said to me only thing I can do I is refund the last 4 invoices and get paid outside PayPapl. Buyer said there is NO issue at all we are very happy with seller services. They said to the buyer: "there's nothing you did or can do". PayPal told me "they'd hold my bread for 180 days", then for 90 days, OR I can refund the 4 invoices. Each time I called I spoke to someone different.

They said it was their system's fault, not mine or the buyer, the buyer made no claims at all.. Luckily, the buyer was cool enough to help me. I had to call PayPal each time to do a refund. Lift HOLD, refund, with them on the phone, repeat. What a damn HASSLE!

I set up Stripe the next day and it's all good to go now! Good luck with PayPal. They can hold your shit without informing you and you can't do jack shit. And I had people to pay! I am kinda pissed but happy I got all of my invoices paid. Does this mean I can't write a blog post about what happened to me? Maybe this type of shit is normal with PayPal.

- - -

If you'd like to write a blog post, feel free to reach out to me for editing help. Email in my profile.

It's probably worth pointing out that every online payment service I've ever encountered has incredibly one-sided terms that allow them to screw the merchant more-or-less at will. Even if the service itself doesn't feel the need to use them, the card networks typically require them, so any service backed by card payments will almost certainly have them.

PayPal is notorious for this kind of thing, obviously to anyone who's been around relevant online forums for a while, but then PayPal is also the 800lb gorilla of the online payments industry so it's hard to assess how representative the nightmare stories really are. I don't know enough about the parent poster's story to offer an opinion, but I've seen plenty of vitriol directed toward PayPal from other merchants whose accounts were frozen but who subsequently turned out to have been clearly in violation of reasonable PayPal terms and either hadn't read those terms or had read them but hoped no-one would notice the prohibited behaviour.

I've also heard nightmare stories about many other providers, including about the shiny new startups of recent years. But again, without knowing the context and the overall scale of their businesses, it's impossible to make any objective judgement about how likely it is to happen to you if you're a merchant who is just trying to collect payments and does nothing wrong.

Paypal is offered a lot as an option for virtual goods, such as virtual items or services for games. There is always a lot of caution around it, because anyone that has used it in this area for longer than a day realizes that they can be scammed nearly arbitrary amounts if they decide to trust payments from Paypal.

For this reason, it's generally required either that you do out of bound methods to help verify your identity (i.e. show us a picture of your ID and we will make sure it matches your Paypal name after you pay us), and/or that you have a lot of reputation within whatever community you're working from.

If you do this verification wrong as a merchant, you will find yourself charged back with absolutely no recourse after you have only sold to a few customers. I've seen this happy many times, sometimes with $10 and sometimes with $1,000. Even if you do this verification correct, you can still find yourself charged back with no recourse, so it's advised not to do this with large payments or sketchy customers, especially in the area of virtual goods. This is also commonly done in areas wiht donations, such as Twitch donations of thouands of dollars being charged back after the sender has already recieved their desired reaction/fame/etc.

Given what I have seen, I read this clause as a requirement that you are not allowed to fairy inform users about the risks of Paypal, and depending on how this requirement is enforced, it could mean the end of Paypal as a method in the virtual goods area, as new methods like Bitcoin slowly take over due to the lack of chargebacks.

I can't believe PayPal and the credit card cartels can get away with this shit. Card fees eat up an astounding amount of profit from low margin items, retailers should be able to encourage whatever payment method they want.

If customers knew how much they were actually paying to these card companies indirectly (thousands of dollars a year) most people would switch to cash

True. At the same time, don't forget that banks charge business a small fee to deposit cash into their bank account. For example: https://www.tdcanadatrust.com/products-services/small-busine...

That's for Canada. In the US I have seen a lot of business checking accounts accept the few bunch of checks for free. ACH transfers are unlimited.

They even fee cash and coin deposits. I have never had a bank charge a fee for cash (or coin) deposits.

In Canada the Interac debit card network has transaction fees on the order of a few cents. It's crazy how much money US payment processors manage to skim off.

It's crazy that having a couple huge companies that silently collude to maintain their existing market share somehow isn't antitrust

Just under the non-discouragement clause:

We are changing the standard transaction fee for sellers selling goods or services online to buyers outside the U.S. from 3.9% to 4.4% plus the existing fixed fee based on the currency.

holy hell, that is getting ridiculous

I run a two-sided network. Our providers sometimes ask if PayPal is possible. It's helpful they include draconian language like this in their contracts; giving me something to reference, other than the myriad horror stories, when saying No.

They're their own worst enemy.

I read that draconian language myself back when the buzz first started about Paypal, too. I don't understand how convenience is so valuable that you'd put your whole account at risk.

"At all your points of sale (in whatever form)"

Does this not mean that any bricks'n'clicks business has to offer Paypal at their physical counter? And that they can't levy variable card processing fees, at least not where the fee for Paypal is higher?

Thank you for "bricks-n-clicks"

People will continue to prefer PayPal alternatives when the costs are so much higher to use paypal and I would assume this is generally difficult to enforce because it relies on a user telling paypal that a vendor asked them to use an alternative method. I would make paypal my last payment option offered to a buyer.

There's sites where they openly ask buyers not to use PP for some items that are high fraud risk and allow PP for less risky items. This means retailers will just drop PP as an option completely. I generally use it for most of my online buying as it's become difficult lately to use prepaid cards for some reason, I used to be able to effortlessly convert cryptocurrency into a virtual visa and buy anything but alas. Paypal, for buyers, is an easy experience now there's no waiting for your account to be loaded from a bank.

As a buyer, I would rather send in a check or not make the purchase before using Pay Pal.

Buyer insisted on PP. I needed the project / money and did not wanna cause a problem. I asked buyer many times to wire / ACH the money. I kinda "had" to accept PP. Im not a rockstar. Can't demand / insist my preferred method. But there is a happy ending. I still have the gig and now they pay with stripe. ;-)

Prior posting, 45+ comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13591601

Why is eBay so protective of PayPal? PayPal has been a separate company from eBay since 2015.

eBay stockholders got PYPL shares 1:1 when they split. People who own lots of the former (eBay insiders & higher ups) have a large stake in the latter.

Presuming absolutely no shared financial interests and pretending there are no remaining synergies. The people who run ebay have to be close with the people that run Paypal...

The strategies that built paypal were in line with the ebay ethos.

They still got binding contracts. For example they have to have PayPal as a payment option till 2020 and a decent amount must be processed through PayPal. It might change after 2020.

With eBay, you have a new fraud vector to worry about:

eBay's "Buyer Protection" is a superset of the former Paypal-centric coverage such that if a buyer initiates a return against a seller, eBay can choose to make that buyer whole by charging the credit card you use for your eBay seller fees and memberships (if any), regardless of payment method used by the buyer.

Disclaimer: PP employee--below opinions are my own and do not represent PayPal.

Things I have actually seen myself:

* Charging a fee to use PayPal that is not charged otherwise.

* Modal dialogs before PayPal describing PayPal as slower / riskier / less customized / etc.

* Disallowing PayPal for certain items.

I'm sure there are a lot of others. As patio11 mentioned in a comment below, this sort of boilerplate is common for Payments and I don't see it as unreasonable to ask for equal treatment to be given.

Charging extra for any payment method while offering other common ones is not a problem at all. You have to consider the trouble that a massive number of merchants have with paypal. The risk of dealing with something odd is financially relevant. The time spent on conflict resolution (between merchant and paypal that is) consumes time, which delays payments and has a cascading effect on other operations. This time costs money, which many add as a fee for people that want to use paypal.

I don't know a single commercial seller that once offered or still offers paypal payments and doesn't have a horror story that resulted in serious financial and operational trouble for them.

PP could introduce this if they had a good image. Right now it's considered by many to be the ... Oracle of payment processing.

It wouldn't be unreasonable for equal treatment to be given if the service you provided was equal. It is not. That's why merchants dissuade its use.

All of these things are done because PP has, at some point in the past, screwed over the merchant. Paypal is so bad that at this point, it's not even unreasonable to assume that even a part-time seller has never had a problem with them. The only reason any seller uses them is because the customers prefer it or they don't want to set up their own Stripe integration.

It's blatantly clear that PP existed with nearly no competition for many years.

> I don't see it as unreasonable to ask for equal treatment to be given.

If the service was equal, I doubt you'd need to ask - those discouragements likely only exist because PayPal is a more risky and/or costly payment method for the seller.

All of these things are fair though.

* Paypal charges the merchant more (in terms of fees in some cases, holding funds, and time wasted dealing with PayPal's nonsense), so why wouldn't they inform customers of this? If you have a loyal user base they would want more of the money to go to the merchant with less friction, not PayPal.

* Paypal is slower/riskier/less customized, etc. Have you done a checkout on PayPal recently where you didn't have a PayPal account? It sucks.

* Disallowing certain items is absolutely necessary. PayPal can (for no reason at all) allow customers to hose the merchant, and often it can be much more annoying to get a refund even when the merchant seems to want to provide one.

So yeah, when the service offered is equal, maybe we can discuss equal treatment, but until then people should be recommending their customer's don't use PayPal if they don't have to. The alternatives are lower cost, easier to use, more customer/merchant friendly, and generally more enjoyable to use.

I've gone my entire life without creating a PayPal account (even when I have to use it as part of the checkout process) and I see no reason to change that now or ever.

WTF?

So, in your opinion, equal treatment means that you have to sell broadly similar products from different manufacturers at the same price? So, Porsche could require that you sell their cars at the same price as a Fiat, even though you have to buy it from them at a much higher price than what you pay for the Fiat?

How the fuck is it not obvious that paypal gets treated differently because it is fucking different? Do you seriously think that merchants make up such rules arbitrarily? That it's not maybe that paypal is expensive, so they do the only thing that's fair: They charge the person responsible for the increased costs those increased costs? That it's not maybe that paypal lets itself be used for fraud much more easily than other payment methods in some scenarios, so merchants aren't willing to take that additional risk?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com