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Comment by danilocampos | Hacker News Reader

I've been sitting here for the last five minutes trying to make a point eloquently. I'm having a hard time with it. So I'll just put it like this:

What else can we really expect from a product whose parent is eBay?

This company is a fucking fossil with all the hunger for customer satisfaction of a used tissue.

Is it convenient for users? Yeah. Is it worth gambling your entire business on? Given the lack of accountability these clowns enjoy, I'm going to say probably not. Neither eBay or PayPal has evolved in any meaningful way in the last decade. On the contrary: they've steadily declined in user experience and customer satisfaction. Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern?

On principle, on practicality, for the sake of all of our futures: just say no to PayPal.

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> Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern?

Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it.

Oh if you're in the US for the US you might be able (and want) to gamble on an other younger service, but in the wider world? It's a fucking wasteland, it's either Paypal or Big Bank Merchant Account, and those are no fun at all either.

My card expired (and was renewed) recently, I decided to stop using paypal (so I did not update the account to the new card), by the third christmas gift I tried to get I had to re-activate it, because either the gift in question wasn't available from anybody not using Paypal (etsy merchants, for instance) or because the CC gateway alternatives to paypal were unusable to plain broken.

>>Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it.

Off the top of my head, https://payments.amazon.com/ is a great alternative. Not sure how the rates stack up, but I definitely trust Amazon more than I trust PayPal. I'm sure there are more alternatives available, I don't know why so many people insist on using PayPal. I think Amazon allows donations cause kickstarter.com uses it, and you don't necessarily get anything if you fund a project. I'm guessing the tricky part here is the "donations", but PayPal certainly has a poor customer satisfaction record.

You didn't read closely. Inside the US there are lots of alternatives. Outside the US it is, as the fellow said, a wasteland.

Take Amazon payments, for example:

"Q: What countries and currencies are supported by Amazon FPS? Amazon FPS allows U.S. as well as international customers to use major credit cards to make payments on Amazon FPS-powered websites. ... All transactions are in U.S. dollars."

Emphasis mine, because that little aside renders Amazon worthless to me.

Source: http://aws.amazon.com/fps/faqs/

I don't know about other European countries, but there is a German subsidiary of Amazon Payments, so EUR transactions are possible.

https://payments.amazon.de/home

I don't know about Amazon.de (I don't speak German), but at least for the UK version you need to have the following before you can sign up for a Amazon Payments merchant account:

* Have a phone with a UK-based billing address available for our registration service to contact you. * Have a credit card (issued by a UK-based bank) * Have a current account with a UK-based bank. (Optional; you can set this up after registration)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/gateway-eu

So unless in you're in one of the few countries supported by Amazon Payments, you're out of luck (as far us Amazon Payments is concerned).

that renders Amazon worthless? That seems a little harsh. Can't you just list your prices in USD?

I know people in India who order books from Amazon US and pay in USD using their India-issued credit card.

I think it's just a matter of UX to show the price in USD to a foreign audience.

> I think it's just a matter of UX to show the price in USD to a foreign audience.

There are risk implications from having to predict currency movements. Or I could take futures contracts, which is difficult and in itself a warning flag to banks if I have low income. There may also be complicating tax implications from trying conduct all my business in USD and then converting the profits.

It would be easier for me, by far, to conduct my business in my local currency. This is not an unreasonable constraint.

I haven't seen the developer side of it, but from the consumer POV in Germany, it hardly looks like a wasteland. There are a couple of services like Moneybookers, ClickandBuy, which are very PayPal-like.

There are also a few services circumventing both money "escrow" (not sure if the term is applicable) and the credit card companies by interfacing directly with your bank deposits, either directly (using your PIN/TAN, which you have to give to them, which seems insane) or through cooperation with the banks.

Fewer people over here have credit cards, which has lead to a different landscape. For many things, simple bank transfers are a viable payment option, too, as they are typically very fast (with ever shortening legal limits to how long they may take).

I haven't had a great experience with Moneybookers. I asked a question about their business account, and in response they shut down personal account without notice. They eventually changed their mind when I pointed out they'd violated their own terms of service, but it wasn't handled very well.

I didn't like ClickandBuy very much, either. IIRC I used them to pay using credit card, and when I got a refund from the merchant, of course the money ended up in the CnB account. I almost forgot about the money and had to pay some stupid fee to get them to close the account and transfer the money to my bank account. Not more than a few Euros, but I still felt cheated and more than that, it was a hassle.

As I said they're similar to PayPal. ;)

Germany is a special country. In germany you can have direct, instant bank transfers, through internet. And that's free. No fees.

So that's like paypal, but faster, more secure, cheaper also.

Many use that. I know PostBank makes <1min transfers, as I used to be a customer not long ago, for example.

If you are below 50 Ebay-Points they force you to accept Paypal payments. They even have a semi decent parser that does not permit statements like "I don't accept Paypal payments" in the Ebay offer.

Even if you manage to mangle a statement like that into your offer, chances are the buyer simply transfers the money via Paypal because he did not read the text. Happend two out of two times. Made me jump out of my skin each time.

By now I hate Ebay and Paypal so much, I stopped selling my yardsale-stuff there. Will go to the next flea-market and sell there. Person to person.

Waiting for an alternative auctioning platform.

It's not an auction site, but Craigslist is a pretty good place to buy and sell used stuff. I've had pretty good luck both buying and selling things through it. Last I checked, the listings were free too (except for real estate).

Unfortunately we don't have Craigslist in Europe. AFAIK there is no viable alternative to Ebay right now.

It may not be available where you live, but there are lively Craigslists for most of the major cities in Europe: Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dublin, Edinburgh, Florence, London, Munich, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Rome, Stockholm, Venice, and others.

http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites#EU

A lot new businesses, especially SaaS like services, need recurring payments and only PayPal offers those. For one-off payments there are indeed a lot of alternatives but few are available world-wide.

Xoom is the closest one to Paypal, the last time i checked

>> Why trust a business to such a stagnant concern? >Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it.

That's a bit like saying "I had to get a pay day loan at 27% per week interest, I had no alternative and they fucking know it".

It probably means you're doing it wrong.

If the business you're trusting to Paypal can't get a Big Bank Merchant Account, maybe you need to work out why (and whether it's a very good reason... it might be that your great idea is exactly the sort of thing Paypal _needs_ to shut down quickly before lots of people lose their money.)

Etsy merchants (and eBay sellers) all happily use Paypal, because for the "put it in a box, ship it by FedEx" businesses have _way_ less "trouble" with Paypal than everybody else.

That's a bit like saying "I had to get a pay day loan at 27% per week interest, I had no alternative and they fucking know it".

It probably means you're doing it wrong.

Either that or you don't have enough starting capital to do it right.

At least in the US, you don't need significant amounts of capital to open a merchant account. There is more paperwork, but then again merchant banks don't engage in the shenanigans that PayPal seems to do with alarming regularity.

> Because there is no alternative and they fucking know it.

Hopefully in a few years time when it's matured, Bitcoin will be that alternative.

In order to be a real alternative to PayPal, Bitcoin will have to avoid the problems that digital gold currencies had, since it's far more similar to them than to PayPal. What were those problems? Accounts differ.

The digital gold currencies had exactly one problem: they worked like cash, but without the necessary decentralization and untraceability. So, people started using them like cash, including for illicit purposes, but the services remained subject to centralized shutdown and seizure.

Bitcoin? No way. We might as well use Facebook credits. Getting Aunt Martha to trust some sketchy form of 'money' to make an online payment is going to be exceptionally difficult. Imagine suing for damages in bitcoins -- it's not a legal currency anywhere. It's a digital version of trading goats.

"Getting Aunt Martha to trust some sketchy form of 'money' to make an online payment is going to be exceptionally difficult."

Really? Then how did Aunt Martha ever get to trust some sketchy online auction site called "ebay"?

Tens/hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing?

I can buy and sell goats well enough....

We actually have a couple of goats we'd like to sell, but are having trouble finding a buyer.

Goats-as-currency have very poor liquidity, fungibility, and divisibility.

Bah. Baaaah.

As a long time paypal user I must say that I rarely see such a good online based service.

I phoned them multiple times and was always answered by well informed people that promptly provided me all the information I needed. Having lived in multiple countries and run paypal based businesses in more than one country simultaneously, I presented them with quite a few tricky questions which they always solved very quickly. It is also worth to mention that they were kind.

One thing I hate more and more is donations. Specially begging for donations. There's always something fishy with donations deal with big money. I would not be surprised if paypal would start to tighten donations policies which apparently seems to be happening. Donation buttons are epidemic anyway.

Really? The only times I've had to phone paypal were when they started enforcing transaction holds on the account attached to eBay (despite having 100% REAL positive feedback on the account i've had since 2002) and I called to ask what the fuck they were smoking. Got no information what so ever.

It's impossible to get ahold of anyone who speaks understandable english, or can do anything other than apologize and make excuses for shitty, shady business practices.

All of the power of the bank with none of the responsibility.

Just say no!

(bitter? me?)

I don't know if this is relevant, but as an european I phoned paypal europe. As far as I can tell from their accent, the phone was picked by irish people.

Paypal rocks, until it doesn't.

I used it for years, mostly selling stuff on ebay. I never had negative feedback, never had an issue. I even used one of their two-factor auth tokens. Then one day, Paypal decided that they needed to review my account, and froze about $900 for 6 months.

The whole process was completely arbitrary and capricious. Haven't done business with Paypal or eBay ever since.

I'm mostly familiar with these things from the customer end, but what about google checkout? AFAIK it's international and similar to paypal. Anyway I absolutely love using it when it's an option.

Neither eBay or PayPal has evolved in any meaningful way in the last decade.

PayPal has been continually extending it's international merchant support. They may look like bloodsucking imbeciles in the US, but as an Estonian I am thankful for their support as nobody else cares.

For the other side:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318009

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3318173

Paypal may have a point, they may not. Regardless, freezing thousands of dollars on a whim because "they're worried" and then freezing the individual's personal account is just boneheaded. You can't run a bank like that.

PayPal is not a bank, which perhaps is the problem. People expect them to behave like a bank, despite the fact they clearly state they do not behave like one.

To my knowledge, Paypal is not a bank!

On the contrary, NOT freezing them would be totally boneheaded. OP describes an EXTREMELY sketchy way of collecting money (take money from one random person on the internet, promise you they are sending a "mystery" gift to some other person on the internet) that clearly violates PayPal's TOS (you can only ship to billing addresses on paypal).

There is not a payment processor in the world that wouldn't freeze someone under these conditions.

Please read saurik's posts in this thread. He provides excellent, reasoned explanations for what is going on.

Personally, I think the conclusion should be: if you have an unusual business model or transactions that are not seller-to-buyer, don't use PayPal. It goes against their rules, and you will lose money and go through a lot of grief.

edit: wdewind as well.

"On principle, on practicality, for the sake of all of our futures: just say no to PayPal."

I did just that, a few days ago. If I hadn't, the Regretsy story would've done it. http://www.shdon.com/blog/2011/12/06/bye-bye-paypal-you-suck

Wow, that's histrionic.

PayPal's customers are the people who use it. You, as a merchant, are not a customer of theirs, but a necessary evil to keep the customers coming. PayPal's customers love it. PayPal's merchants don't like it because PayPal has fraud prevention methods that are opaque and hamfistedly applied. That's a fine complaint, but this breathless "for the sake of the world don't ever use PayPal" garbage is pretty ridiculous.

If you want to do anything beyond selling tangible goods or simple subscriptions, you should probably reevaluate using PayPal to do that. PayPal isn't the best product for everything, and frankly, I'm sick of every merchant doing some crazy scheme (seriously, "give us money and maybe we'll send you a gift of some unspecified value in the future"? can you fucking spell "chargeback"?) bitching and moaning into the HN echo chamber whenever PayPal tells them to stop that.

> but this breathless "for the sake of the world don't ever use PayPal"

You know, I've been working on my condescension. I really have – my last girlfriend hated that shit. And it's gotten a lot better. But you just had to use a cutely loaded little word like "histrionic," so there's really no other course...

So what I'd like to do now is offer a brief explanation of how quotation marks work.

Generally, quotation marks are used to attribute their contained content, verbatim, to a specific person. By including words in quotation marks you are saying, in effect, "this person said precisely this."

I did not say precisely what you quoted. What I said instead (handily, the text is right there), was that for all our futures, where we is a group of people who care about building things and getting paid, that we shouldn't pin our hopes on a company that can declare our money limbo-ed on a whim. The more who avoid PayPal as a result of their flakiness, the brighter the future looks for a sane payment processing landscape.

It's okay to have policies. It's okay to have business models you will and won't support. What isn't okay is to both handle large sums of people's money and make your customer service a recourse-free black box at the same time.

> A single word or a short phrase may be enclosed in quotation marks to indicate ironic use.

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Quotation-Marks-Correctly

I think it was pretty clear that this was the case, when I read it didn't make me think that you said that.

> A single word or a short phrase may be enclosed in quotation marks to indicate ironic use.

Normally, yes. But the primary use of quotation marks is to quote - in a direct response to something someone wrote, you come across as either dishonest or stupid if you claim to be using them ironically.

When I read gergles's comment, it was clear to me that he was describing a class of sentiment, and not directly quoting who he replied to. The manner in which he did it is, to me, idiomatic English.

Firstly, you've got it backwards. Paypal takes a cut of the merchant's revenues for virtually passing the money from the consumer to the merchant; therefore, the merchant is PayPal's customer, and the consumers the necessary evil.

Secondly, PayPal didn't simply say "stop that". They gave him the runaround, froze unrelated accounts, and stonewalled him when he tried to make whatever accommodations would please them. That they were rude and condescending during all of this only adds insult to injury.

"Don't ever use PayPal" is really a reasonable reaction to these sorts of stories. When a seemingly legitimate transaction can unexpectedly invite the fury of paypal's overzealous fraud protection drones, how could the reaction be anything but?

First, the merchants are the customers - they're the ones paying the fees to provide the service to their customers.

Second, you don't have to be a merchant to hate PayPal. Most of the time I will simply choose not to buy something rather than use PayPal. --The last time I couldn't avoid them was about 2 years ago.

>Second, you don't have to be a merchant to hate PayPal.

Exactly. I refuse to use it more due to ethical reasons[1] than anything else, but there are a metric shit-ton of reasons for not supporting and using Paypal.

We need more (viable) alternatives. Paypal is a bit like Windows - it gained a monopoly because it was successful early on due to the lack of viable competition, and now we are at a point where we need to get rid of that monopoly, but it's difficult to do so - but we must.

[1] See the Wikileaks blockade, amongst other things. It's by far not the first time they pulled that shit, the WL incident just was the worst example so far.

And I would add that their fraud methods don't work either. My account was emptied in several fraud transactions and for the number of transaction and the amount you could see very clear that they were guessing my paypal balance. For example they started with $100 transations until they got insufficient balance error and then tried with $20, at the end they made 7 transactions of $1.

For paypal those were legitimate payments, even when they were made from a different country, which they could check but were too lazy to try. At the end they accepted that there were a fraud, but do you know how much they refund? 5 of the 7 transactions of $1.

Actually, the merchants ARE the customers. The people who buy using pay pal aren't the ones paying the fees. Without merchants accepting PayPal, then no one would use PayPal. I am transitioning my own company away from PayPal -- we're going to use chargify for recurring and braintree for everything else. PayPal can go to hell. They've been treating us like criminals because we are located in China, are incorporated in Nevada, have a DC phone number and a California bank account. They don't seem to understand global businesses. They're a step below retarded. We've had our accounts frozen multiple times and don't respond to emails. I hate PayPal and as soon as I can get their crap disintangled from our web application code, we're done with them. We get better customer device from China's Union Pay and that is a state owned black hole of a company. At least they respond to emails and don't lock our account everytime I log in from a hotel room on the road.

Have you ever tried calling them? They have giant call centers of people who actually answer phones, they have seriously short hold times, and are capable of escalating tickets up the chain pretty rapidly by just forwarding your call around their internal departments.

However, that's not the only option. Do you have an account on their merchant services support site? Have you talked to them about getting a dedicated account manager? Did you ever spend the time to calmly and happily explain to them your situation, and then get that information stored with your account details so others later will see it when they go to help you?

This experience of saying that PayPal doesn't respond is simply so far and away unlike my experience (where I am, if anything, I often feel inundated with communication from PayPal, having been dragged into hour-long conference calls with underwriting, or having to carefully explain my business model multiple times to different people) that I'd really like to understand what causes the differences.

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