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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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".

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

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