PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers | Hacker News Reader

PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers

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65 pointsjavery25 comments

PayPal has always charged this rate for business accounts when selling goods and services.

So, the problem here appears to be that everyone running their personal account for business purposes is bitching about how they can't sneak around the fees anymore.

Or just ditch PayPal altogether, and sign up for Google Checkout.

Good advice. I used PayPal for the first time in years trying out listia.com the other day, and was amazed that they still haven't added autocomplete="off" to their credit card number fields - every piece of information one needs to make online purchases is cached (unencrypted, usually) to your hard disk. Idiocy.

Google checkout is one of those mostly-USA only for merchants things, yet again. Paypal is far more international, and alternatives tend to be even more expensive.

No, Moneybookers is popular globally as well and it's cheaper plus more reliable and secure.

And has a disaster for a user interface. Once every three months I have to file a tax report and that's when I log in to see each transaction for those three months. Their history form has a "[Go]" button and a "[Search]" button. I press the wrong one each and every time.

There is no details page for a transaction and you can only see the item that was sold in a CSS popup that disappears when you mouse away, making it impossible to copy-paste.

And then there's the fact that their calculations can be off sometimes. We have some sales that are € 12.75. The transaction costs for that is € 0.44 or € 0.45, I don't know which: the amount field says it's € 0.44, but our balance is actually decreased by € 0.45. That's a rather bad mistake to make as a payment provider...

All in all I'm not too happy with Moneybookers. It gets us money and it's cheap, but it's perfectly clear why they are cheap...

Edit: Also, Moneybookers sales were less than 5% of the Paypal sales...

OK, MB is not perfect either but I still prefer it to PayPal and use it whenever I can.

Also MB has some security advantages. You can already notice on the front end (captcha etc.)

I don't particularly care for the captcha. It annoys me and I'm assuming Paypal has protected against brute-force login attempts differently. It's not like captchas fully protect against those anyway.

Paypal really is much more polished. Their reporting is top-notch. They have an API. And they have an interface which doesn't confuse me. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better than MB...

Wait til they steal your money. PayPal used to do this, but then they got the shit sued out of em and got regulated. (I think they're legally a bank now?)

http://slash7.com/articles/2009/3/26/google-is-evil-worse-th...

I use both of them. I prefer Paypal. Google Checkout is just a redheaded stepchild of a product. It has more sharp edges than a shuriken put through a blender.

Here's one nuisance, among many: Google Checkout makes it impossible for you to search by important pieces of data like, oh, customer name.

If I get an email from Jane Smith at an unrecognized email address (because customers often have several of them), I can't find her transaction through Google Checkout. I have to open up my dashboard, which was coded by some chump who writes bingo card software in his spare time but nonetheless is better at search than Google, look up the transaction, then copy/paste the order number so I can search by it at Google.

I'm confused as to the problem you're describing.

I log in to Google Checkout, there's a search box right above the list of recent orders. (Title: "Search Orders.") I type in "Smith" and get a list of 10 orders. 6 of them are buyers with the last name "Smith." The other four have "Smith" in the address somewhere.

I agree that search and reporting (among other things) leaves much to be desired--I ended up hiring someone to do data entry when I wanted a list of customer zip codes recently--but when I find myself in a similar situation to what you describe, I have no problems at all.

Ahh -- seems they got around to fixing that. I swear, it used to be Order Number or email address only.

I emailed a small online vendor that their creditcard field was being cached like this, and I was told it was a 'browser feature' that I had to turn off. It almost makes me regret making my purchases there.

Would someone please clarify exactly what has changed? I cannot make out heads or tails from the discussion here or on Paypal. How was it before? How is it now?

Official clarification from PayPal: https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2009/08/a-clarification-on-pay...

I read that prior to asking for clarity! I want specifics. Can anyone confirm exactly what changed?

There are 3 account types on Paypal: Personal, Premier, and Business. A natural person will usually have Personal or Premier. Personal accounts cannot receive payments funded by credit cards. This restriction tends to force non-consumer use of Paypal into a Premier account. In particular, eBay sellers must use Premier accounts.

Of note: previously, Personal accounts did not charge money for receiving payments. Almost no one uses Personal accounts to receive payments, because they cannot take payments by credit cards, cannot be used on eBay, and cannot be used with APIs (last time I checked). Premier accounts have always charged money for receiving payments.

What changed: when you send a payment, you have to specify what the payment is for. There are a few options:

Payment for: Services, Goods, eBay Items Personal payment: Gift, Payment Owed, Cash Advance, Living Expense, Other

Here's the change: if the sender codes a payment as one of the three "payment for" options, the recipient gets charged. This is unremarkable for 99.99% of people receiving payments on Paypal, because they've had premier accounts for years (to receive CC payments), but it inconveniences people who were using Paypal to receive payments funded from Paypal balances.

Note: You can still receive payments, for free, if they're both funded from a Paypal balance and coded as Gift, Payment Owed, etc.

So the real problem is that their service is just too damn confusing.

The Fee page on PayPal's site doesn't exactly clarify either: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/marketingweb?cmd=_display-...

It still says "Free when the money comes from PayPal balance or bank account", which is what I thought people were complaining is no longer the case.

I wonder why services like Moneybookers are not popular. It doesn't charge a fee, it's available World wide and very simple to use.

Wait. What?

Paypal always charged to receive money. That's how it works.

What am I missing?

The rates have changed. PayPal didn't tell it's users. But you're right, the blog post didn't make that clear.

The rates haven't changed. They stopped charging business accounts a fee for personal payments, and clarified (made the UI more explicit) that they do charge a fee for all account types for goods & services.

See https://www.thepaypalblog.com/2009/08/a-clarification-on-pay...

The parent article is just wrong.

The rates have changed. I've noticed it in our own sales. It started earlier this month.

What were you being charged before, and what are you being charged now?

"Forgets" is being too nice.

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