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Comment by atirip | Hacker News Reader

I only buy from merchants that offer PayPal (there are few I trust by card, like Amazon). And the reason is that whatever it happens, I can always get my money back with PayPal. It happened 3 times in last 5 years that seller took the money and never shipped anything. I got all them resolved very quickly.

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That's BS. Had a seller screwing me over who "sold" me a VR headset.

He gave me a UPS tracking number which belonged to a package that was delivered to another city, another person, was part 1 of a 3 package delivery and weighted 28kg, pretty heavy weight headset. The only match was the zip code everything else had nothing to do with me.

So I complained to Paypal, gave them all the data that showed that the tracking number wasn't from the right package and still PayPal let the seller keep the money.

This is a relatively old trick at this point, so it's crazy that it still works. Effectively makes their protections useless.

Aside: Where do you live that has a postal service where zip codes match in different cities? Sounds like someone misunderstood the point of a postal [zip] code. Or, did I misunderstand?

As a rule of thumb, sure, you can presume that zip codes follow political boundaries (city, county or state). The vast majority of times, that's the case.

However, if you do a lot of mailing, you'll discover some zip codes that cross state lines (because some remote area is actually served by a post office across the state line).

Or some area where several towns & cities map to a single "preferred" name that the USPS uses (example: Centennial, CO).

Zip codes are for the convenience of USPS and to make their life easier. The edge cases are very fuzzy & fractal.

This is more common than you would think in the U.S. ZIP codes don't always follow geopolitical boundaries. There are two cities in 57717. Some ZIP codes even cross state boundaries; USPS won't state it when you look up ZIP 42223 in their web tool, but part of it covers Tennessee. For example, the Pratt Museum is in Fort Campbell TN but has a Fort Campbell KY mailing address.

It's more one of the villages surrounding a small town. They all share the same zip code but are 10km apart.

We have even cities that share a zip code but are in different federal states.

Well, we can use credit card charge back for such purpose?

You can, but you probably have to call up your bank during business hours, wait on hold for a while, and then get given the runaround for a while. PayPal you just push a button and it's done.

My Bank of America credit card lets me dispute charges online, with a simple series of web forms. Very convenient.

In the UK my experience with chargebacks is that they’re very biased towards the company. It’s a drawn-out process during which you get harassed by the company’s anti-chargeback team in to accepting an ex gratia payment etc. you have to supply lots of evidence and when the company provides some poor quality evidence the bank goes “oh well that’s decided then” as if responding was sufficient.

This is true, you have to very persistent with the chargeback route, sometimes only a threat of legal action against the bank will move things forward.

If you live in the US, you could use Privacy for this (privacy.com). Not only do they allow you to create a separate card for each merchant, pause/unpause/close/set spend limits and so on, but their support is so nice that half the time they'll just give you credit instead of making you bother with a proper chargeback. And you can do that over email.

Works even with merchants that don't support PayPal. Everyone supports good old card numbers.

Can only load privacy.com with a bank account last I checked, I prefer to use a credit card.

If you contact their support over email they'll enable the option for you to use a card as your funding source. But IIRC you have to connect a bank account first with more than $50 in it and then you can switch to the card.

Source: I use a card as my funding source.

It's true. Indeed you can get your money back with PayPal.

It took my company three years of litigations and finally PayPal did in fact return our money.

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