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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

What a funny way to grab a ton of free press.

They must have planned this for some time given the logistics involved and the time it takes to freeze quantity of water that size and get a nice and clear chunk.

My own paypal saga isn't over yet, though there have been some surprising developments.

I sincerely hope that someone will one of these days replace paypal with a better way of doing peer-to-peer payments, but online fraud being what it is the question is if it actually can be done without in the long run incurring the same kind of penalties that paypal use has now.

After all, when you're just starting out with a payment service most or even all of your transactions are legitimate. But once the service gets more popular there will be an inevitable influx of scammers, whitewashers, identity thieves,phishers and other less desirable elements. To get rid of the one without hurting the other is a very difficult problem.

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I hope I don't jinx myself but I have been using PayPal for better part of the decade. So far there have been very few issues. No random account locks.

More recently, I had two payment disputes by scumbags. In both instances, I called up paypal and less than 2 minutes of conversation later, I had my money back in my account. Blew me away. I honestly had written those disputes off going by what I'd heard.

I remain in two minds about attacking paypal for account blocks. Almost every company that dares go after this space will have to do their fair share of blocks or risk losing money to fraud. Obviously when you do blocks, innocent bystanders may get caught. I don't think that is a paypal problem as much as it is an industry reality. PayPal's just at a scale where you hear a lot more stories.

Until there is a competitor with some sort of scale that does not need to do account blocks, I'm not sold on attacking PP.

In Australia, businesses usually go through banks for online payment via credit cards. The banks are under similar constraints and chargeback fraud is a serious problem. Just because you delivered a product & have a signature doesn't mean the customer can't call the CC company, lie and get their money back. That doesn't even touch on stolen numbers and such.

However, when you deal with your bank, you usually have a business banker with a name, a phone number and an office. You are never in a hopeless support ticket black hole. That makes a big difference.

It's not as hopeless with PayPal as it was in earlier years. Now you can get someone on the phone within a few minutes.

Glad to hear it, but I think that just shows us how low the bar is. If it's urgent and important, most businesses can get someone in their office within hours. Obviously it depends on how much business you do with them, but that's OK. With paypal businesses transacting $10k per year month get similar treatment to someone who sells a used ipod once a year.

Also, I've heard examples where this is not the case. Eg Couldn't get Paypal to pick up the phone even though paypal was holding $100ks of their money. (http://mixergy.com/dodocase-patrick-buckley-interview/)

This kind of sentiment is important. Can WePay survive if PayPal decides to improve customer service and cater to small groups?

You mean like 3 years later? But seriously, I started using Paypal recently to collect money and so far, everything is fine. I did get some checks but it was resolved after a few calls and some faxes. Not a lot of money was involved so it was not a life or death situation. I understand they do need to check for fraud but some of the cases I read do send chills up my spine.

And for that privelege you've got to pay big bucks in monthly account fees, pass the 'merchant application' process and pay a percent on top of all your transactions. You'll also have to setup a credit card processing system and secure all those credit card details you've been collecting on your site. Good luck with getting an online-only merchant account as a new company with no trading history, because it's not going to happen.

With PayPal you can be operating in an hour. They're also cheaper than all banks, unless you have some serious transaction volume. You can hook it into a simple website and start processing payments without even a https cert.

Of course, any serious site will want their own merchant account, credit card processing and the rest. But before you get to that point PayPal is a very handy shortcut that has enabled millions of small sites and sellers.

When PayPal starts charging and acting like a bank, then you can compare the service levels. I personally think, that for the transaction scale and amount of fraud they have to deal with, PayPal does a relatively good job. They aren't saints, but for the vast majority, PayPal transactions work as designed.

In other words : you get what you pay for.

I agree, but I think you exagerate. Banks are often harder to work with. But, since they are the alternative (actually businesses often have both) most businesses I know deal with, it's worth comparing them.

It's not that hard to get an account, especially if you already exist as a customer, even a private one. The costs tend to even out over a certain volume but again, they aren't that high. I'm not sure how easy it would be if you weren't a company, didn't have an address and weren't a customer.

In Australia the most common setup is site + payment gateway (bank or 3rd party) + merchant account. If you are using some existing ecommerce software (hosted, bought or OS) it usually integrates pretty easily with large payment gateways. It all costs about 2-$400 per year plus processing fees, not much different to in store CC processing. I think it ends up at parity with paypal at around 50-$150k depending of total transaction volume (depending on transaction sizes), so you are right that it doesn't scale to micro business levels very easily.

But banks, difficult and bureaucratic as they are do compete for business clients and they do it mostly on the back of customer service.

With paypal you don't get what you pay for. If you transact $7.22 per year you get the same service as $722k.

>With paypal you don't get what you pay for. If you transact $7.22 per year you get the same service as $722k.

That's a good point actually. Maybe the anti-PayPal meme might die a little if you could actually get preferred service (and not frozen accounts) if you have a history of processing payments over a certain level. They already know who that is because they give you better pricing for volume.

One meme is businesses launching on paypal, transacting a lot on week 1 and getting frozen for being a suspicious newcomer - also variations on that. For many types of business (eg retail), that's a cash flow showstopper.

Banks' solution to this sort of thing is low tech. Have a local banker talk to you, maybe pay a visit.

What's terrible about PayPal is not that they lock accounts, but that they make it nearly impossible to reach them. It took me 5 days to find a number to call and talk to someone to unfreeze my account (which got locked only because I used it in the UK). Terrible customer service!

I can understand that some security measures are required, but I moved away from paypal because after being locked very easily it's then really hard and painful to show that your account is legit. Especially when all you get are automatic responses to your emails.

What happens when you called them?

As I explained in a comment here some time ago, I was not able to speak to anyone even by calling. Just a recorded voice telling me things I already knew. (Sorry, I can't find that comment. Does somebody know how can I search for it here on HN?)

Really? Are you in the US? I am always able to get someone on the phone. Login to your paypal, goto contact and call the 800 number. They will give you a pin to enter. It may expedite your call.

Yes, this is what a lot of people told me, but I was in Italy at that time. Through the number I found on the website I was never able to speak to anybody. Did not try to make a call to the US though.

Try searchyc.com. Duckduckgo, and Google also like hackernews. Duckduckgo has special support for searchyc.

HN itself doesn't provide search.

i moved away from paypal, went pci compliant, got a merchant account, was a pain stetting up but feel so much better on the other side.

Yes, that's a good way to get payments from customers to you, but it sucks as a way of paying for auction goods and freelance work, which is how I used to use paypal.

International wire transfers are a lot harder to do without actually visiting a branch of the bank I'm with and filling out a bunch of forms, and they take much longer to process too.

"International wire transfers are a lot harder to do without actually visiting a branch of the bank I'm with and filling out a bunch of forms, and they take much longer to process too."

That's my personal problem too. Sending money from US to Canada or Canada to the US is a pain. If only they had the same check clearance system, it would solve so much. Same as how having similar phone numbers makes it so much easier.

Heh. jacquesm lives somewhere that doesn't even have checks!

When I needed to get paid by a Dutch company, the easiest solution turned out to be for me to open a new bank account.

> Heh. jacquesm lives somewhere that doesn't even have checks!

I pictured jacquesm needing to use a custom silver DeLorean to drive there and back. Flux capacitor and all.

Well I think the US is one of the only countries left using checks. Everyone else (Most of Europe) has moved on to direct bank transfers for everything.

I can do international wire transfers straight from my bank's online interface - is there a regulatory reason that US and Canadian banks can't offer something similar?

Nope, we have this too. I know Chase & BoA both do it online.

have your sales increased

don't tell me you aren't using analytics!

Hi Jacques, as someone who's had trouble with Paypal, what stops you from using, say, WePay in place of PayPal? I just wanted to understand your thought process regarding this?

Nothing, I just have not had the need to pay someone for anything in the last two weeks. Alternatives that I can use are international wire transfers and western union. Both have their own set of disadvantages, I'm most likely going to give some other service (possibly wepay) a shot when the next payment comes up. (and that's going to be fairly soon by the looks of it).

Ok, do let us know how it works out :) I'm not sure if you'll be able to use WePay though, since their FAQs[1] state that they don't allow international payments at the moment(if that's what you'll be doing)

[1] https://www.wepay.com/about/faq#thirteen

Yes, international only.

If it's local I have much faster and more reliable ways than any web server, bank-to-bank transfers here are online and nearly instant.

Ok, so that rules out wepay then.

I can't speak for Jacques, but as a fellow european, the single one thing stopping me from using WePay is: (lack of) international payments. I've just integrated PayPal in my startup against my own better judgement, but as soon as we pull in a fixed amount of money (1000$ for now), I'm switching to a decent merchant-based solution.

I see, thanks c1sc0.

I prefer petty thieves to institutional ones.

From what I read about some of their early troubles, some of the thieves trying to use the system were anything but petty.

Do you have a link? I'd really like to read more about that.

It's more a vague recollection. Isn't there something about it in "Founders at Work"?

In "Founders at Work", one of the PayPal founders claimed that in the early days they were losing $10 million a month to fraud, and rising fast enough that it would soon eclipse profit, when they chose to develop an aggressive anti-fraud system.

It's discussed at length in Eric M. Jackson's[1] The PayPal Wars[2].

[1] Former PayPal marketing executive

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_PayPal_Wars

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