Yes, think about that. A merchant account -- where they hold your company's money -- relies on your personal credit score.

Anecdata: I had two chargebacks in five years of web software sales. Both claims were buyers ripping me off. I provided signed FedEx receipts for boxed software shipments and IP addresses/dates/times when the customer registered the software and downloaded updates. I ate the full cost (plus investigation and chargeback fees) both times. (This is "cost of doing business" and not an opportunity for a blog post, IMHO.)

From the post: "And thank god I made that [five figure] withdrawal when I did, because yesterday came the second phone call, informing me that a reserve would indeed be placed on my account."

I believe this action is what actually triggered the issue. If he paid the costs of running his business out of his PayPal account and took consistent monthly paychecks, it would have been far less of a flag.

Sucks that you have to do it, and we software types are famously short-tempered when it comes to dealing with real-world bureaucratic nonsense, but sometimes a bit of careful planning and playing the game wins the race.

I always have mixed feeling on these stories.

On the one hand, if you operate almost entirely online, you're in amidst a mass of scammers and conmen, it's a much higher risk, hence everything being more draconian. So there's always problems. Brick and mortar businesses are much less as there's a real presence, etc.

On the other hand, this is a long established business. Are they really that high-risk any more? Why are they treated like someone who's just started? Why can't Paypal treat them more respectfully as there's plenty of trading history. Why are there no mechanisms for establishing real identities that are much stronger than what they seem to be doing?

That's especially true for PayPal now. Before merchants didn't have much choice. If PayPal continues to be seen as difficult and risky, the better-qualified merchants will be the first to shift to other services. That will leave PayPal with a much more risky customer base than they have now.

Money transfer systems are different. They draw a lot of dark, evil forces that try not just to hack their systems, but to game and abuse it through normal operations.

It's unfortunate that legitimate businesses get caught in the crossfire sometimes, but we rarely hear about how many credit card thieves PayPal's system rightful stops. (Answer: It's a lot.)

So your suggested way around this is to incur credit charges & pay for the credit risk baked into the interest rate all so that Paypal is covered?

That's where the positives end for me however. For Paypal, I fear it's too little too late. You've done too much damage to yourselves. I get the reasons why you do things, but the communication over the last years has been atrocious.

We're in the UK and are just waiting for Stripe to come over. I think a lot of other businesses are thinking along the same lines as well.

Your fee structure is pretty expensive as well. There's also a lot of hidden costs:

- We're on an upper tier so should have a reduced commission rate. However, after scratching my head for ages as to why a majority of our sales are not at the lowered rate I finally find the link about cross border fees or whatever reason you use to charge us more. As an example, some of our $119 USD sales have $4.35 fees which is ~3.7%. Our current rate it says on our account should be 1.9%. Your fees structure is not as clear as it should be.

- Have you tried issuing a refund in a different currency? You have to draw money from your bank (even if there are available funds), which is converted to the correct currency which because your spreads as so expensive means sometimes refunds cost us money. I phoned up about this and they told me to open different currency balances which I did and which fixed the issue, but again, bad communication and a broken process

- Related to the previous point, your spreads on foreign conversions are high. I think they've improved a bit over the last couple of years but I still consider them an expensive hidden cost. I contacted Stripe asking what spreads they offer, and they told me they would consider it a hidden cost and they offer customers the same spreads the banks give them.

Also, your website is mind bogglingly slow. See this support ticket I opened: https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Access-and-security/Why-...

The support person didn't do anything about it. I didn't expect them to though, as Paypal is an impenetrable behemoth that doesn't seem to care about these sorts of things.

Your website being as slow as it is, mind numbingly slow, is honestly enough reason alone for me to move service. Trying to find transactions just is a huge waste of my time waiting for each page to load. Try using your sandbox with pages that load that slow.

> there's a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.

So can you make your website faster for a start?

2. there were many instances where you were greedy ( diaspora, wikileaks). Alot of stories in IM forums that you freeze money from vendors and never return the money ( to either side).

3. tens of thousands vendors are waiting for stripe to go abroad including me so we could run away from your draconian "service"

Paypal, your transparency sucks. If my account is fishy, tell what it is. We're no longer in the McCarthy times.

And besides, I'm living in the EU. US rules are not always popular for us.

Amazon like Paypal, there have also same problems, could you forward my comments to Jeff Bezos.

Good riddance, Amazon. Amazon Hold my seller account: amtopsellers about $11552.78 dollar forever and refuse to release to us. Amazon have all the power of a bank and yet none of the responsibility.

From my experience and that of others who’ve suffered the same, it’s clear that Amazon are interested in buyers, not

sellers. Amazon hold money amounting to thousands — literally thousands and thousands and thousands — from sellers without

any valid reason, when not even your bank is legally allowed do that? (I’ve expanded on this point in this comment.) AMAZON, you are the scourge of the internet.

Please see :

http://joeyuen.posterous.com/good-riddance-amazon

I also believed this to be true, but wouldn't that mean Kickstarter (and therefore Amazon) are flagrantly violating T&Cs? I wonder if Amazon has a special arrangement with the main card issuers in this regard.

There are some FTC rules about this too, IIRC, that a product must ship within a certain period following payment. I once worked with a company where this was an issue: they had to provide a great deal of data to the FTC to plead their case.

Here in Australia, my bank told me they were obligated to have a chargeback process resolved within 90 days.

Not sure if its a legal thing or just their own internal policy (Westpac).

It would be very helpful for someone to post (from experience and/or inside knowledge) a "How work with PayPal and avoid problems" FAQ

Then there's their automated fraud prevention system that is just too trigger happy. As an example: I bought an item on eBay the other week and they refused to process the payment. A couple of days later I decided to try again before buying from another seller and it went through without issues.

Additionally, many have issues with the fees. Going back to eBay, you get hit with fees for both services, and I think many just see it as being too much given other emerging comparable services.

  If you don't use PayPal, how do you receive payment from 
  customers who don't have credit cards?

Moneybookers interface is terrible, and they will expose your customers to this horrible interface. Their customer service seems to be confused but I've never heard horror stories.

There are payment solutions geared towards European customers so that you can accept bank transfers, etc.

In fact, everyone I know has at least one debit card (either MasterCard or VISA), aside from the number of people who have an AMEX/VISA (credit type).

And debit cards work everywhere. I've used my VISA Electron (debit) pretty much everywhere in the developed world, both online and travelling abroad.

In the UK we have "prepaid credit cards"[1] which could be useful for some people who are otherwise unable to get credit.

[1] confusing name, because they never give you credit, and I don't think they have the same protections as normal credit cards.

If neither Amazon nor Google's brand recognition hasn't convinced folks (buyers or sellers) to start pushing it instead of PayPal for Internet purchases, I can only hope it's because their solutions are equally terrible - otherwise, I have a hard time seeing how a new player will make headway in this space. And I'd really like a new player. :/

You know how every time a new payment provider comes up and people kvelch that it isn't available in their country and how no provider is? This is because every payment provider which attempts to hit as many countries as Paypal does dies. They're killed by fraud. (Fraud kills domestic ones, too, all the time, but it's marginally less frequent.)

Luckily, Paypal is an anti-fraud AI company which also happens to run credit cards sometimes. When in doubt, they will always come down on the conservative side. This is why they still exist. (Early in their corporate history they lost -- no kidding -- one hundred million dollars to fraud.)

This perception does not actually match reality, though: most people bitten by this are unaware that similar activity would get them shut down by the fraud department at e.g. a bank. See comments by dangrossman, etc.

* At most merchant services providers, underwriting happens up front: you have to describe your business, what you're selling, expected volume, etc. on an application, and go back and forth with the bank, before you are allowed to accept credit cards. PayPal lets you start immediately, and only gets the information from you once you've started transacting some meaningful volume. So the risk problems are weeded out with other processors right at the start, where with PayPal it can come up suddenly.

* These people have never even thought about underwriting and risk assessment. They treat PayPal as if it's a consumer service, when PayPal has to treat it seriously -- they're essentially making a rolling loan in the amount of 6 months of your transaction volume -- because if you disappear, they're on the hook for the chargebacks for all your past payments. People do stuff no other processor would let them do -- like taking massive donations with no prior approval, selling pre-orders to software that hasn't been written yet -- and PayPal isn't OK with it either once they find out.

* PayPal merchants are disproportionately more often individuals than actual businesses compared to what other processors see... because it's so easy to open an account, and everyone that's used eBay already has one.

* Because the merchants are individuals, and have no experience with underwriting at other processors, and have previously used accounts suddenly limited or frozen, they're confused and surprised. Add to that customer service that won't really tell you much once an account's been closed, and you end up with a couple really angry people a month: cue blog post about how PayPal is evil and if only it were a bank, they couldn't do this.

The result is that the system is treating them identically to how a bank would treat a more organized company; however, with an accountant on hand and an understanding of the rules, the organized company is much less likely to make silly mistakes (such as selling people a product that is shipped more than 48 hours later, already in violation of VISA's rules, to a third-party's address and then claiming that it is a "donation" and not a "purchase" <- an example from earlier this year).

There are also simply more players, as we are now talking about a bunch of couple-person companies that are using PayPal to accept credit cards, and even individuals who may not be incorporated at all but are using it to launch and sell products on their websites. These kinds of people are also much more likely to decide to attempt "lynch-mob" as their primary means of recourse against a company doing something they disliked, so we are doubly more likely to hear about situations.

However, as a merchant who operates something that many people (incorrectly) call sketchy, and one who has spent much too long learning all of the relevant tax regulations, reading up on credit cards, talking to people with real merchant accounts, and having meetings with banks about possibly using their service instead, my opinion is: PayPal is not that difficult to talk to and they are not actually unreasonable; there are things they are incompetent at, but this isn't one of them.

Paypal's profit margin is a small percentage of the value of a transaction. The potential losses due to fraud can go as high as 100% of the value of the transaction. I.e. their losses can be 50-100x as big as their gains.

Further, the selling point of Paypal is they let anyone who wants to set up shop and use Paypal for money transfers. The tradeoff you make by using Paypal is much lower setup costs (relative to a merchant account) for much higher risk.

(Disclosure: I work at Braintree)

Oh, and I just signed up for Zoompass.

As far as we can tell, there is only one catch, but it's a big one: you can only take payments from bank accounts within the reach of their direct debit system. That means UK-only today, and they've announced their intent to expand across Europe in "mid-2012" [1], but it's not clear when they might go any further.

[1] https://gocardless.com/faq

We also work from the same office as GC and they're good guys. Always on the phone with customers, helping out and listening to feedback.

Once you pay someone with BTC, your money is gone. It's that simple. Unless you involve a third party of some kind, and then it's PayPal all over again... though I assume it's a great deal easier to become a BTC middleman than a middleman of any established currency, due to lack of idiotic government red tape to jump through.