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Comment by madeofpalk | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.

I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet.

The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess.

But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.

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We had a problem where after about 10 years, PayPal suddenly decided that our account was in the wrong country, and the only solution was to close it. Kafkaesque.

I wrote about it here: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...

> I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour.

How is that not a bad experience for a buyer who never got an item he paid for?

Because the seller fulfilled their part of the sale (I.e. posting the item).

No postal system is without risk; that’s why they offer package insurance, registered post, etc.

This is an insufficient explanation. When I pay you money I expect to get something in return. I have zero insight into who dropped the ball nor do I care. Your obligation wasn't to drop something at the mail it was to provide the customer with product whether this involves a rocket ship, fedex, or literal magic.

Every real merchant who deals with the public at scale accepts this and refunds in such cases. Presumably they eat the cost or THEY purchase insurance for the shipping and roll this into the cost so they don't have to tell customers I'm spending YOUR money on drugs and hookers and don't care if you actually got anything for it.

Such interactions absolutely destroy relationships with customers and the customers bank is likely to issue a charge back to protect their relationship with their customers.

For me, it depends on the context. In a B2B transaction, my basic assumption is that the vendor will ensure that the goods are delivered, and will make things right if they fail.

In my personal life on the other hand, I'm regularly prompted at checkout to decide between registered post with insurance, or regular post without. If I opted out of insurance, I wouldn't blame the seller for the package not arriving or any damage (presuming of course that it was packaged appropriately), and I'd fully expect Paypal to resolve in their favour after verifying that the package was actually sent.

It's true that this would ruin the customer relationship which is why some businesses may offer to make things right anyway, but I personally wouldn't expect it.

That said, the consumer protection laws in my country (Australia) are fairly strong so I may well be entitled to redress; this is just my personal attitude.

Depends on the country. In central europe the seller is responsible until the package arrives at the buyer (for private transactions, not business) so in this case Paypal would resolve in favor of the buyer and you'd have to get the money from the package service.

It might be a bad experience for the buyer (I'm not sure - I guess maybe PayPal still reimbursed them? idk?), but I did my part. It's not on me to lose money when I did everything I could.

The buyer kept emailing me after it, 'updating' me on the situation, which I mostly ignored. I believe he was in some smaller town and he knew the postman and had a very strong suspicion that he stole it, or something like that.

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