> At least that's my opinion. I probably wouldn't use PayPal should I ever start a business needing a payment processor, but as a consumer? It's awesome.
No, as a consumer PayPal is a fucking nightmare.
Their customer service makes the stereotypical American DMV look like paradise (I don't live in the US, so I have only the image of the DMV from movies and TV).
Seriously, if you have a problem, just try to get their customer service reps to give half a shit about you and your issue. They'll make you fax (it's 2015...) a million forms to prove your identity and your mother's maiden name and your pet rock's birth certificate, and then tell you that they can't help you with this problem, you'll have to resolve it with the seller.
Their email response time is measured in glacial periods.
Oh, and you want to buy something on eBay and you have some account credit? Well fuck you, you can't pay with PayPal. Your existing payment methods (credit card, direct connection to bank account) don't work. Add a new one, scumbag. Oh, but not one that's already on your account. Nope, we've seen right through your clever trick and won't allow it. In fact, you can't pay with a different credit card that's associated with another PayPal account, because fuck you, that's why.
I finally, after endless hours trying different combinations, figured out that I had to consume the account credit before they would let me use my traditional methods of payment to pay for the transaction.
You might say that you've never had the above problems, and that's fine. You've been incredibly lucky.
I avoid using PayPal now whenever possible. They're the devil reincarnated.
> You might say that you've never had the above problems, and that's fine. You've been incredibly lucky.
Not only that, I never heard of such problems and pretty much everyone I know under 50 uses paypal.
That said, it's good to have you horizont broadened :)
But I don't have money on my paypal account anyway, whatever they need they just take directly from my checking account, when an order falls through, I deposit the money back to my account immediately.
I guess pretty much everyone you know doesn't move, then.
You try moving out of the country with a paypal account. They'll make you close your account and open a new one with a different email address. No other way to change country in your billing settings.
And their joke of a 2FA doesn't support the standard 2FA/OTP systems.
They're improving, but at a snail's pace. Personally I wouldn't recommend Paypal to anyone. It's not just about whether or not their customers get screwed.
The problem isn't Paypal. The problem is competing sets of laws. You'd have the same problem with a bank, or any startup that cared enough about what it was doing to actually follow financial institution laws.
PayPal makes you create a new account because each country has different requirements for financial institutions and customer data retention. Often times, laws in one country conflict with the laws of another. In some cases, like moving from the US to Europe, under EU laws it would be illegal for Paypal to maintain the US account data, but under US laws it would be illegal for Paypal (as a financial institution) to delete that account data for a period of several years. The KISS solution: just make the customer create a new account, subject to the laws of the jurisdiction they are moving to (and stored in a system compliant with those laws), and transfer any money in the existing account using existing mechanisms with their existing reporting processes that have been sanity-checked thousands of times by prior transactions.
No, as a consumer PayPal is a fucking nightmare.
Their customer service makes the stereotypical American DMV look like paradise (I don't live in the US, so I have only the image of the DMV from movies and TV).
Seriously, if you have a problem, just try to get their customer service reps to give half a shit about you and your issue. They'll make you fax (it's 2015...) a million forms to prove your identity and your mother's maiden name and your pet rock's birth certificate, and then tell you that they can't help you with this problem, you'll have to resolve it with the seller.
Their email response time is measured in glacial periods.
Oh, and you want to buy something on eBay and you have some account credit? Well fuck you, you can't pay with PayPal. Your existing payment methods (credit card, direct connection to bank account) don't work. Add a new one, scumbag. Oh, but not one that's already on your account. Nope, we've seen right through your clever trick and won't allow it. In fact, you can't pay with a different credit card that's associated with another PayPal account, because fuck you, that's why.
I finally, after endless hours trying different combinations, figured out that I had to consume the account credit before they would let me use my traditional methods of payment to pay for the transaction.
You might say that you've never had the above problems, and that's fine. You've been incredibly lucky.
I avoid using PayPal now whenever possible. They're the devil reincarnated.