[patio11]

You require my name, home address, email address, and phone number in order for me to purchase downloadable software via Paypal. You do not need any of that information. You want it so that some tool in marketing can have pretty powerpoints. It should be optional

This is actually less for marketing purposes and more for running anti-fraud analysis, which is a key consideration when you sell software at their scales. When I write my (totally legitimate) Japanese address and phone number combined with my American credit cards, it often ends up in an order getting held for purgatory for 48 ~ 72 hours until I can point them to the resolutions for the last four orders I did through them and the fact that none were chargebacks for being stolen credit cards.

Steam also does something similar. You can thank your local pirate.

The digital backup fee is scamtastic, and (shockingly) isn't the worst thing they have pulled over the last few years (that would be automatically adding rebill fraud 'coupon booklet' subscriptions to the orders). They split the fee $7 to DR and $1 to the software publisher, which means that for sales of $50 software they make substantially more from that addon than for the software itself at almost all of their (myriad) pricing schemes for the core DR payment processing experience.

[barrkel]

I think "via PayPal" is the key distinction that makes the fraud excuse less valid.

[citricsquid]

How so? It's as trivial as creating a new email account to create a new Paypal account, and even if they require credit card only Paypal accounts that can be easily fraudulent too. Fraud via paypal is just as rife as fraud without.

[rodh]

The only point at which an address can be used to prevent fraud, is between the credit card charging process and your bank. If it's paypal charging your credit card, they're the only ones who need your address.

[patio11]

That isn't true -- you can run a variety of heuristics to catch N% of fraud (and X% of legitimate payments) prior to submitting them to the bank, getting them accepted, and then having your merchant account ganked for high chargeback rates.

For example, an annoying system which will decrease chargebacks is "If your IP address goes to a country other than your billing address, shoot first and ask questions later." It bites me all the time, but there are sensible business reasons for it.