I'm both surprised they didn't already, and am more surprised people are still willing to even use PayPal at this point.
Some advantages for me:
1. I don't touch your credit card or personal info. I don't want to know those things. I don't want to be responsible for keeping them secure.
2. Integration with the post office for generating shipping labels is seamless.
3. I think people are more confident to buy something from a little known business if they feel that PP is protecting them. The increase in sales probably covers the PP fee.
4. I can run my business from a passive web page. All of the other services require me to manage some kind of server, running code, that I become responsible for maintaining. I love coding, but don't want it to be part of this business.
From reading articles and forum posts two main sources of horror stories seem to be:
1. People who just seem to be "accident prone" in terms of getting into disputes with others.
2. Selling non-physical goods, which I can only imagine has its own pitfalls that I don't know about.
So, I'll use PayPal these days to pay someone with my credit card, but I'd be extremely cautious about receiving more than a small amount of money through them.
A few months ago, I checked an infrequently-used email address and noticed some unusual notifications about a "new user added to your PayPal account." I hadn't even remembered this was the email associated with my PayPal account - so after managing to reset my password and log back in, I managed to figure out that someone must have skimmed or brute-forced my PayPal password, set up a second account, attached their bank account to that new account, and begun draining my own bank account. By this point they'd gotten around $5,000 out of it.
Some features I noticed on the PayPal side that seemed obviously bad: PayPal sends no indication via email of these literal bank transfers, and there is a "feature" on the PayPal site where you can hide (but not, thankfully, wholesale delete) previously concluded transactions. The criminals had just hidden every one of the transfers. They also consistently used something like $499.99 as the transfer value, presumably because that amount prevents some automated level of scrutiny from kicking in.
Additional bad points: the interface for registering a complaint is in a highly counterintuitive workflow through the PayPal site, and seems almost entirely set up for people to register "normal" complaints, not fraudulent transactions.
The good side, however, was that I managed to find the right place, opened a case, and got the thing resolved and the money refunded to my bank account within 24 hours. So, excellent job, fraud resolution team at PayPal!
To tie back to the theme of this thread: my assumption is this fraud will become vastly easier after PayPal breaks (further?) with FDIC-insured fiat currency and people can just turn hacked bank accounts into BTC.
That's just one of the headaches they deal with. Also one of the reasons for using cryptocurrencies. PayPal may be creating the worst of both worlds by combining the complexity of cryptocurrency transactions with the need to abide by byzantine regulations.
Works perfectly well for us, we don't handle any PI or CC details and clubs can connect their PP account to our platform for their registration / event management needs.
My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.
Enough people to steal 20 billion USD a year according to https://stripe.com/en-fr/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101
Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.
Yes, I absolutely do think that. When I make a purchase through paypal, I am redirected to an authorization page hosted on paypal's domain. The recipient never sees my card number. I must authorize each charge. Whereas when I give my card number, the recipient can charge whatever they want, whenever they want, however much they want*
* subject to fraud protection.
This matters because sites do get hacked. The paypal horror stories you see are typically not consumer sided.
And of course the main feature of cryptocurrencies is that PayPal can't freeze your account when you try to withdraw money.
Sure, as does Apple & Google pay. I'm not saying PayPal is the only way, but I am frequently faced with either paypal or credit card, and in that situation I will do paypal every single time
this is absolutely the case for me, multiple times I had a great experience getting refunds with PayPal and multiple times I regretted not purchasing something using PayPal because getting a refund was much harder.
I now use PayPal exclusively for any online purchase > $500 precisely for this reason[1].
[1] unless it's a vendor that I know has a good return policy, such as JB HiFi.
As for "the real world", there's cash and chip+PIN. Never used paypal IRL. Is that a thing in your country, did you mean that literally? If so, where are you from?
If I really don't trust the seller, I can always still get some sort of insurance thing, but an X% insurance fee needn't be the default for every transaction. (Even if the % is invisible to you, then the seller updates their product's prices. The seller won't choose to eat less just to finance your transaction fees... the only way to not pay those is operate a deficit, which eventually leads to bankruptcy and loss of your warranty, which isn't a desirable situation either)
Stripe would occasionally charge me an obscene amount of money to pay for the bank "charge back" fees
I never had this issue with PayPal; i usually get dispute cases, but they always get positively closed
My only issue with PayPal is their devise conversion fees, i'd argue their behavior there constitutes fraud.. and their UX, their web interface is painfully slow
Next to nobody's budged. It's all Paypal. I'm taking a class and I paid the teacher via Venmo, which is a fucking Paypal company. It's so damn entrenched. When the fuck can I take payments for furry porn via FedNow instead of giving money to these jerkwads.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
Crypto was supposed to be an alternative to all this but, well, look how that worked out.
It gave up a decade ago. I wouldn't call that "working out".
have to chose
Maybe you live somewhere that your landlord takes bitcoin, that's nice for you, my landlord wants USD. If you would like to fund me finding out if my landlord will actually take bitcoin if I ask nicely enough then please feel free to send a couple bitcoins to 3CzUW828J2u5wCB2xD4iE9kH8dPTokjxow.
I wouldn't store any money in it though.
And today I mostly see Adyen, Stripe, Klarna, Apple/Google Pay... in Europe PayPal is comically expensive.
Paypal is still probably the most popular "easy" checkout option in the UK, more popular than Stripe, Google pay and Amazon pay.
Maybe not more popular than Klarna, but I don't have a debt problem so I don't want to use that. Never heard of Adyen and I can't recall ever seeing Apple pay.