PayPal is my first choice and if I go to check out on your store and you don't have PayPal as an option, the chances I abandon my cart if I don't have my wallet just went up exponentially. I use it as a buffer between me and the provider. Everything goes through a credit card so I still get the points/miles I would get entering the card directly. Except now they don't have a credit card token they can keep charging forever. They have a PayPal token that I can log into PayPal and immediately revoke, asynchronously, without involving the merchant or my credit card at all.

I don't need to worry about my details still being with that merchant. I don't have to worry about the merchant's convolution and likely-illegal cancellation process. The only negative I can think of is that any dispute has to go through PayPal, and while I've never done it I would bet money they are going to be skewed more in the merchant's favor than the credit card company. But that being said I have had fully legitimate chargebacks (as in not "I want a refund and they said no" but "this is a fraudulent charge I never agreed to") get denied and reversed by Discover so that's not a 100% certainty either.

I never receive money through PayPal so while I've read all the same horror stories everyone else has, that doesn't seem likely to affect me. My biggest gripe is the full-screen advertisement for whatever service they're pushing every time you log in on the website.

Up until not so long ago that was the easiest "payment wallet" to have around.

Want to have charges go direct to your bank for 2 weeks ? you move it up on the list.

Want to try a new card but are not sure you'll keep using it ? add to the wallet and move up or down depending on how much you want to use it.

And it also managed subscriptions.

It is now a steaming pile of garbage for so many reasons, and it has always been a death trap for any small merchant, but they gave a fairly good shot at the wallet side of things. Good luck getting Nintendo for instance trust any other third party wallet system.

Because I don't want to give the credit card details to every site out there. And Because the Resolution Center works wanders with merchants who are not being forthcoming to resolve your problems. I once had an issue that a merchant had delivered less than half of the items that I had ordered, i contacted them and they requested (after 2 days) Proof that I had not received the items. I could only produce the photo of the opened package which was clearly too small to contain everything they were supposed to deliver and the weight in the package label that clearly was too little for everything I was supposed to get. They tried to stall asking proof that i had not received a second package with the rest of the missing items.(How can you prove a negative?

I got fed up and opened a refund ticket with paypal describing the problems and within 30 min the merchant contacted me promising to send the missing items and refund 20% of the cost if i closed the ticket in paypal.

It's quicker than entering your credit card details and address again and again.

PayPal is used by a lot more people than most think to buy.

First it can pay directly from a bank account.

Second a lot of countries don’t have many options other than PayPal.

Sometimes there's no choice, usually for international purchases. eBay used to also prefer PayPal somehow, idk how it is now. I know that some Etsy sellers are PayPal-only.