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by attendant3446 693 days ago
PayPal once quietly added my European card (EUR zone) as USD. And when I paid for a product in EUR, it "thoughtfully" (for them) converted the amount twice using their special currency exchange rate.

You can't do without airports and airlines, but why PayPal still exists in 2024 - I don't understand.
2 comments
NavinF 692 days ago
>why PayPal still exists in 2024

Because they have a ton of users. People who don’t have credit card numbers saved on autofill so PayPal is more convenient. People also think it’s safer because the website doesn’t see your card number

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attendant3446 692 days ago
I struggle to see how it is convenient. At least on Android, when you pay for something, it doesn't use the installed app, but makes you login in the browser. And they still don't support 2FA or Passkeys properly, making me to receive an SMS almost every time.
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NavinF 691 days ago
I can't answer that because I rarely use paypal myself. In fact they banned one of my two accounts (personal, business) for using gift cards which makes me uninterested in using the other one more than once a year.

That aside, I've seen many normal people use it for the reasons I described: They don't want to type in their card number and they think it's unsafe to type in their card number. It's (literally) all in their head so don't think too hard about it.

The practical alternative is Apple Pay, but you can't use it on Android.

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mrguyorama 693 days ago
>You can't do without airports and airlines, but why PayPal still exists in 2024 - I don't understand.

What don't you understand? In the US, the party that says "the government should not interfere with business" wins a lot of elections and the party that says "the government should protect consumers from corporate harm" wins way fewer elections.

So we have almost no consumer protections, so it's largely not illegal or risky for a business to fuck over their consumers which is very profitable so most businesses fuck over their consumers in various ways.

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attendant3446 692 days ago
What does this have to do with the government? My point was that PayPal is terrible and why is there no widely used alternative to it? I know there are alternatives, but usually only about 5 people use them. And somehow in Germany (and it seems in the US too) everyone still uses PayPal.
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mardifoufs 692 days ago
Yeah it's the US's fault if a corporation misbehaves in Europe. It's so sad that Europe cannot legislate or do anything about it. PayPal is just inevitable I guess. Wait no, Europe is more than capable of doing that but they don't care about it either. Hence why they also don't do anything against Ryanair. Oops!
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