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Comment by sunshinekitty | Hacker News Reader

At one point on the internet PayPal was the most trusted way to send and receive money - at least you are limiting sharing your personal payment information with random companies on the internet who may or may not be compliant. Lately though, with companies like Stripe and Plaid making it nearly frictionless to add payments to your website just as PP once did, and things like Google & Apple pay - why is there a need to use PayPal anymore? Their support is notoriously awful, the product is slow and dated, as a consumer at least I see no reason to not stop using PayPal (and their subsidies) entirely.

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Paypal G&S generally always gets money back if something went wrong on a p2p transaction. I've been scammed once or twice, but I always use G&S and have received my money back in full.

If you don't use that, then you're pretty much screwed with Paypal F&F, Zelle, Cashapp, Venmo etc. At least as far as I'm aware.

Venmo has a g&s equivalent. Not sure about the others

Venmo banned me for life because I and a friend both signed up a new account to try to send money to each other. The money disappeared, both accounts were locked and they told me I'm never allowed to open a Venmo account again because of my terribly fraudulent money laundering.

JSYK, Venmo and Paypal support a Visa+ Payname (configure it in each app). The Visa+ Payname thing is Visa's attempt to allow cross-app payments but AFAICT only Paypal and Venmo support it....

But if you ever need to send money to a Venmo account from Paypal, or receive money from a Venmo account in Paypal, you can do so with the Visa+ Payname.

I have some friends who are unbanked and banned from a lot of apps, this little work around has saved a few on occasion.

Venmo is owned by PayPal

Yes but they drew a distinction, so I was just clarifying

PayPal is still the only place really that offers viable micropayment fee structure. At least that I know of. At ardour.org, where we have thousands of $1 payments per month, PayPal saves us 23c per $1 transaction.

AFAIK Stripe and Plaid support only a fraction of the countries that PayPal does. And PayPal is still a global brand - recognized by almost everyone, everywhere.

fair point, I was missing the international point of view

> was the most trusted way to send and receive money

This was mostly due to century old banking regulations and the difficulty for any new type of money processors to get themselves connected to the necessary backend systems to actually do anything.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the qualities of PayPal. In many ways they were simply the only game in town.

> why is there a need to use PayPal anymore

When I try to purchase something with my credit card directly on Best Buy's website, my order always gets cancelled (presumably something in their fraud algorithm), but when I pay using PayPal, the order goes through just fine.

Wasn't PayPal at least at one time an easier way to support foreign transactions? Stripe was US-only last time I used it (which was years ago).

People in most countries can use Visa and Mastercard to pay across borders, and have been able to do so long before PayPal existed (at least back as far as the 1980s).

But PayPal probably existed and was easier for merchants in more countries than other payment services at certain points.

I guess what I meant was that with Stripe you had to have to a US bank account, at least that's what I remember last time I used it. Was that the case for PayPal?

> At one point on the internet PayPal was the most trusted way to send and receive money

Not on my planet and I've run $100m+ through them over the years.

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