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Comment by chrislomax | Hacker News Reader

I get worried the more I read about PayPal recently. I have had no immediate problems with PayPal before but I am worried it's more a matter of "When" I get issues and not "If".

This whole conversation is very worrying in particular, can they really be that stupid and un-interested?

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Agreed. Even the most basic, low-level customer service employee should have an idea of the available products. Or even a searchable knowledge base, the lack of effort/care for something as serious as handling money (especially on the scale of PayPal's millions of daily transactions) is frightening.

Agreed, for the last while we have been instructing clients away from Paypal.

The problem is that only companies dealing with them on a merchant level really feel what PayPal is like. From a customer point of view it's a minority who experience problems (from what I read).

So that leaves you in a dilemma, users like using PayPal because it's quick and easy so from a company point of view, you have to offer it as a payment option. It's a massive catch 22.

We saw conversions go literally up 50% when we introduced PayPal as an option for payment on one site so it's really hard to make a stand against it.

Given the number of stories and PayPal's 100M active users, even the merchant complaints are (an extreme) minority of people who have issues. It comes down to PayPal caring more about buyers and big merchants than little merchants.

(Disclaimer: I work for another part of eBay.)

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