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"Hidden" PayPal Fees Inciting Community Unrest
Several sites are reporting on the addition of extra fees to PayPal that are just starting to become common knowledge. While PayPal has certainly had their fair share of controversy, the new "transaction fees" that promise to affect the entire customer base are already well on their way to becoming another. "For example, a personal account sending another personal account money for a one-time payment for, say, mowing your lawn was not previously charged any fees on either side, but is now charged the usual transaction fee (the sender gets to decide who pays). The only way to avoid this is by selecting 'gift' when making the transfer — something you can't do if you're following through on a purchase or invoice from someone. And, if you fall into this category (which many people do), it's likely that you had no idea about the changes until just now."
It'll be an outrage for a month, then the world will settle down. Then they'll start the membership fees.
I think I'm just going to close my Paypal now - I only ever used it because I didn't have a credit card, and I trust the guys over at Steam with my credit card number.
I use it as a conduit for purchases through my bank account, costs me $0.00 in fees.
Until PayPay decides to clean out your bank account.
In which case it costs you every penny you had in it.
Also, they must obviously pay for their operations. I don't understand how someone could expect a financial transaction service to be free.
It shouldn't be free as much as it should be cheaper.
There is no point to micro-transactions anymore with Pay-Pal because of the fees and people are too afraid of their revocations without recourse to sell expensive items through them.
Sadly there is no alternative for ebay these days so people have stopped using it.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Paypal is operating as an unlicensed bank. I am amazed that the Feds have not already come down on them. And don't get me started on Ebay...
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
One PayPal and eBay got together, eBay was already on the way out the door. Everyone had already found out that there just MIGHT be someone out there willing to pay $50 for a $10 pair of speakers, and that it MIGHT be pretty trivial to scam people out of money for a living. 80% or more of eBay is totally worthless to most people due to this.
So now what you have now is a company that makes its money from transactions, and settling a dispute wastes more time than its worth. For every scammed item or payment, there's one side that's unhappy, and one side that's happy. For a net gain of 0%. One person stops using it, the other person continues using it. All they have to do is maintain a decent user base and they'll be around for a while.
Of course, like most companies, they aren't looking to the future at all. They aren't trying to change things to sustain their business.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If you want to accept credit cards, paypal is by far the easiest way to do so since you don't need to qualify for a merchant account and get set up with a card processor.
The anger here is split between the fact that they added the fees without really alerting anyone and the fact that until now their business model had always been to give people free access for personal and near-personal (small scale ebay selling etc.) and then charge fees to the business users who receive payments. People would get comfortable with using the service as a buyer (no fees) and then as a small scale seller (fees only on CC based transactions) before becoming a true revenue stream for paypal when they move a business onto paypals system. Paypal has a lot of annoying stuff going on and maybe some fees are too high (although the real fee problem lies in their parent company getting double fees since you basically have to use paypal with ebay), but I am not sure that charging a small amount for business transactions that cost them money on a site that is otherwise cost and ad free is that big of a problem.
Bottles.
So wait, you got screwed by PayPal, so at the first available opportunity, you gave them your credit card details so you could continue to use their service? This kind of thing is exactly why corporations continue to screw people over - they know they can keep doing it time and time again, and people will just keep coming back for more.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
PayPal works with money like a bank or credit card, but they are treated like an internet Western Union on steroids, and yet most of the public is trusting them like a bank, which is a mistake.
PayPal needs controls like bank. The majority of their transactions may be okay, but that's like 95 to 99%... of billions. That's way too many bad transactions. They need to be made more secure, particularly for consumers.
I avoid PayPal like the plague because I don't want to become a statistic.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Unless your Paypal decides to overcharge and your bank charges your for overdraft fees....
No sig for the moment.
And, yeah, I was more than a bit surprised at the way it panned out. I also didn't know that you could recall a shipment; it was certainly lucky for us that you could.
I honestly don't know what would've happened if we hadn't done the recall. Maybe it was a legitimate buyer, and everything would have been fine. But here's one more "interesting" observation:
I searched to see who else this buyer had dealt with recently, and found one seller. I emailed that seller (through eBay, very official and everything) asking if he'd had any trouble. He said "Yeah, they tried to reverse the charge and claim that they hadn't received the merchandise, but I sent PayPal the tracking info showing that it had been delivered, and PayPal restored the money to my account."
Now, on the old eBay, each of us would have negged the buyer, and anyone else getting a bid from her would have seen the recent negative feedback. But, of course, if sellers can leave negative feedback, they can blackmail buyers, or some damn thing. So not only can we not leave negative feedback, warning other potential sellers about this scammer -- we can't even leave NEUTRAL feedback. We're offered the choice of leaving positive feedback, or none at all.
When eBay supported an open feedback process, it was a great place to buy AND sell. Now, it's pretty much a place for big sellers to move loads of crap, and that's it. There's no way in hell I'd think of using it to sell a popular, high-value item as an individual seller. They've systematically taken away what little buyer protection there used to be, and they've castrated the seller's feedback mechanism -- there's no way to identify problem buyers, and no protection against negative feedback from them.
If the only feedback you can leave is "good job", what's the damn point?
I would like to use Google Checkout for eBay transactions, and I'm sure I'm not the only one.
However, eBay specifically forbids it. I don't know why. Well, I do, but then I don't know why the FTC doesn't smack them down hard for such anti-competitive behavior.
Why can't people just DO WHAT'S RIGHT?
Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't.
The problem with Paypal is that, while they're not an FDIC-insured federally-legislated bank, they behave like one. If you're going to charge me service fees, currency exchange fees, transaction fees, balance fees, "you're a little too liberal for my inbred nationalist sensibilities" fees and "you're selling a big-ticket item so you must be rich" fees, well I expect there to be some very firm rules in place to ensure I get my mileage out of those fees. Dispute resolution ranks pretty high on that list, something Paypal does extremely poorly.
The reason Paypal is such a bastard ? Lack of competition. Paypal is a bigger brand than all other general-public e-payment gateways combined. Bigger than moneybookers, bigger than e-gold... They get away with it, because they're #1. Because the alternative is to get your own merchant account, and that costs way too much money, involves way too much paperwork, and like any bank service, it gives them way too much power over your business. You gotta do this, you gotta do that, can't sell this, can't ring the same amount twice in a row to a single card, if you sell X we increase your fees, if you sell Y we increase your fees AND your mandatory reserve amount, if you sell X + Y you need to fill out this form and put up with your condescending account manager for a half-hour on the phone.
Paypal is a hell of a lot simpler than a merchant account, so they get away with murder, in exchange for the privilege of not having to deal with a real bank.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Actually PayPal and Ebay have been very crafty in avoiding the "Bank" or "Financial Institution" claim.
They are in constant battles with state and federal organizations trying to make sure that they are not deemed a bank as then they would have to play by the rules of the banks. Such as limiting theft, having to take insurance against false or fake transactions.