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by downandout 2920 days ago
If you accept PayPal as a merchant, every dollar you have received is 100% at risk until you have a) received it in your bank account, and b) removed it from any account for which PayPal has the information necessary to perform ACH withdrawals. For merchants, PayPal is a nightmare.

As far as alternatives, customers seem to love PayPal, because they side with buyers effectively 100% of the time in any disputes. So even if there were a convenient PayPal clone (which there isn't, at least in the US), you still wouldn't match the conversion rate that PayPal has, as many people will only use PayPal.

So, you can either accept a lower conversion rate by going with something like Stripe (because users don't want to enter their CC information directly on small merchant sites), or you can accept PayPal and be essentially guaranteed that at some point your account will be closed and you'll be screwed out of a significant amount of revenue. Currently, these are the bad choices that merchants face.
1 comments
astura 2920 days ago
"effectively 100%"... "essentially guaranteed"... Com'on, that's not true.

I've won disputes on PayPal as a seller.

Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.

You're talking nonsense.

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downandout 2920 days ago
I've won disputes on PayPal as a seller.

There are exceptions to every rule, but in the vast majority of cases, they side with buyers. I once had someone that admitted in email that they were trying to extort me into refunding them. PayPal actually wrote back saying they were going to go to bat for me with the card issuer after I showed them these emails, but the card issuer didn't budge. I have no idea if PayPal sent the card issuer the emails, I just know that I wound up being out the money.

So you aren't just fighting with PayPal, you're fighting with card issuers as well. PayPal will side with buyers in most cases, and in the few instances where it is obvious that the merchant is correct and PayPal tries to do the right thing, then the card issuer will pick it up and screw the merchant from their side of it.

Regardless of who does the screwing, the merchant is the one that suffers in the end by accepting PayPal.

Companies have been using PayPal for over a decade without their accounts being closed.

Very large companies have nothing to worry about from PayPal, but small merchants have a very high percentage chance of being screwed by them. See http://www.paypalsucks.com/

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