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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

TLDR; don't use paypal unless your business can sustain large amounts of frozen funds, terrible customer support, and shady fees and business practices.

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I'm baffled by the ongoing willingness to use Paypal. It's been a terrible company since seemingly forever. 116 days I wrote a comment about how terrible it is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13851855 that in turn references my own horror story, from more than a decade ago, 28 days before that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624393.

This is because consumers love PayPal. It means I am not giving my credit card to a potentially shady person and that I have a way to cancel the service. I also have 1 place where I can see all my subscriptions, so I don't keep subscribed to services I don't use but forgot about.

In general, if there are two equivalent options and one takes PayPal and the other doesn't, I am going with the one that takes PayPal.

As a consumer, I prefer Stripe's interface. It is low friction; I enter my details one a site when making a purchase, and if I opt-in, those details are available on any site using Stripe. And protected behind SMS temp passwords.

A credit card is insured. I am not sure I can say the same about the mandatory connction between Paypal and my bank account. It is much riskier to use Paypal than to give a stranger your cc number.

Because my conversion rates go up when we use it, and down when we don't. Sure, you can add social proof, but like any platform you take your chances and plan for when they lose their mind.

Interesting. Looks like you created this account less than a day ago, just to make this lone comment.

I'm pretty sure you shouldn't use paypal even if you can sustain that. :)

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