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Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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>> 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.

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.

>>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'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.

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

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.

> 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.

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