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Comment by thaumaturgy | Hacker News Reader

I have less than no sympathy for businesses with Paypal horror stories at this point. Paypal's reputation is very well known, especially in startup circles, and there are a ton of other services available that will handle payments for startups. There have been several HN threads about them, and it's not too hard to find those on searchyc.com.

If you're starting a business, and you're relying on Paypal to do it, then you're foolishly adding totally unnecessary risk to your business.

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Unfortunately, most of these payment handlers only allow US companies to use their services. I'm in Canada, and I've been trying to find said services, and every one that I've found using searchyc only accepts US companies. Some of them say that international services is "in the works" or "available sometime in the future", but business cannot wait.

Have you contacted your own bank to ask them what your options are?

parent is right.. you might have to use a less agile or easy to integrate solution, but many countries should have standard bank-level methods for allowing you to accept online payments, some way or another

Those threads are mostly full of recommendations that don't make sense. There'll be a couple actual recommendations of merchant account providers, which will have the exact same policies for reviewing accounts, freezing them if there's any red flags, holding funds for the exact same 6 month period, and forbidding factoring as PayPal cited in this case. The other recommendations will be for payment gateways (which do nothing without a merchant account) and some people throwing out names of the hot new subscriptions-as-a-service providers (Recurly, Chargify, etc) which again do nothing without a merchant account and have nothing to do with their policies.

Well said - I completely agree. Anytime I am speaking to a web development customer that wants to accept payments online, I give them the usual rant about the dangers of PayPal. It seems cheap and simple, but what's the different if they can freeze your account and leave your funds unavailable for your business? There's a cool start-up at Duke University that is developing a new way to make payments without cash that could evolve into a powerful payment system: https://www.facebook.com/NoochMoney

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