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Comment by xstartup | Hacker News Reader

Stripe/Braintree are a lot better than PayPal. PayPal will never take your processing history into consideration if their algorithms decide that your account is connected to some account with past violations. This happened when my developer used his API keys on our production resulting in our account with 1M+ revenue/2 years (very few chargebacks if any) of operation banned. As a small startup, it was a death sentence for our business, finding another processor at high volume is difficult when you've no history to show!

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I've avoided paypal for ages because of their heavy handedness with freezes and bans.

They just can't be trusted not to fuck over your business. Not intentionally... but algorithmically. And once that happens their customer support rarely seems to be able to fix the issue.

They just don't seem to care about false positive vendor issues.

I had an issue with my paypal account in Australia where they thought it was ok to pull money out of my credit card when it expired. This failed of course and so they decided to just put me into a negative balance. They never emailed me until about a year later when they threatened to send debt collectors... so I added my singapore credit card. However I couldn’t. It would fail to accept the card. Support told me that my card was stolen because I’m using a singapore card on an Australian account. In the end not having an Aussie bank account or card I was forced to open a new singapore account, send money to the old account. Then close both accounts...

Braintree is owned by PayPal

But the brand name matters. My previous company selling online product to typical non-tech audience, and majority US customer insist on Paypal.

My guess is it's even more popular outside the US, or anywhere where credit cards aren't that common - like europe. We link our banking account to Paypal and use it to have instant payments (and fulfillment) without credit cards. You can't expect people to own credit cards over here.

Almost every payment processor accept debit cards, which is widely used in europe.

But many people are very reluctant about signing up with their debit card details with too many companies, at least I know I am.

Unlike CC you don't get a new number/have half a dozen of different ones of them. So it's a quite a bit more of a hassle should the payment service provider ever have a breach/leak.

Many people didn't like to sign up with PayPal to begin with but, due to its dominance with eBay it was a bitter pill most people just swallowed to do their eBay buying and selling.

Not sure if UK is an outlier here but credit cards are the norm for us.

Didn’t get a lawyer involved?

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