Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

Comment by citricsquid | Hacker News Reader

The reason Paypal are popular is because they offer something no other service can. If you want the versatility and spread of Paypal then you're just going to have to suck it up.

Yes, Paypal do sometimes have problems, but if you follow their rules and regulations and don't build your business around them you should be okay. The majority of horror stories are knee jerk reactions to an unfortunate situation which are never reported on again when a resolution is found.

The reason Paypal have such over zealous fraud checking and don't hesitate to lock accounts until they're 100% sure it's legit is because of how large of a target they are for fraud and also because of how accountable they will be. If someone sends me $10 and I run off with it, Paypal will have to pay out that $10 from their own pocket to the customer, might be okay on a small scale but at Paypals volume...

Personally I think the best method is to have a basic merchant account (authorize, nochex etc) and also Paypal, use your merchant account as the default credit card processor and also offer Paypal for those who either have Paypal accounts or are only comfortable with Paypal. If you're smart about how you use Paypal you'll be fine :)

PayPal locks legit accounts too, all the time, if they feel the type of activity has simply changed/increased in nature. Then to get your money out you have to prove to them otherwise. They will simply keep asking for more and more information from you on purpose to try to make you give up.

And I would bet they have never paid a dollar out of their own pocket to cover fraud, they basically will close the accounts of both parties to cover themselves or take "fees" out of the covered party's return for their "protection service".

Never, ever, keep more than $100 in your PayPal account. You are begging for trouble otherwise. Also if possible close the original checking account that you tied to your PayPal account, because they will tap into it to reverse any transaction at their will, without notice.

Yeah, PayPal can be a pretty big pain. We've had our accounts locked out by them a few times. But eventually they are satisfied and leave you alone. Here's some general tips I'd follow if you do go down the PayPal route.

1) Use your full legal name when creating the account.

2) If you're creating the account for a company, make sure the owner of the account is an officer of the company (CEO, Vice President, etc).

3) Have only one account. If you're creating an account for your business, and you already have a personal account, you're gonna run into problems.

4) Make sure the mailing address you give is actually accessible. PayPal's gonna mail a verification code to you once you start making a sizable amount.

And just in general, once you start getting money into your account, PayPal's always gonna come knocking. At one point, PayPal prevented us from even receiving payments. But eventually, after a while of working with them, they got off our backs and we stopped having problems with them.

Good advice. I use SkipJack and they rarely hassle me, even when I authorize very large sums or rebill. They've never held my funds. I also allow customers to use PayPal if they want and many of them choose to pay with PayPal.

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