PayPal question (yes, it's relevant...)

[Imrahil]

I've never signed up with PayPal & never really wanted to, but I wanted to donate to the board. From what I can gather, there's a $1.98 initial charge (which gets "refunded", which I will never use, but who cares?), but are there any recurring charges?

If you sign up for, say, a one time donation to a board you enjoy, then never use it or even look at it again, are there any downsides (I could put up with being on some mailing list, but I mean real downsides)? Or am I "safe" in signing up just to donate & then won't have to worry about seeing any strange charges appear?

Thanks,
Imrahil

[Timber Loftis]

No recurring charges whatsoever with paypal, AFAIK. I've been signed up for a couple of years and no charges. PayPal makes its money off of the payee not the payor.

[dulouz]

i would never sign up or do business with paypal. here is one of many sites devoted to telling why. http://www.paypalsucks.com/

a quick google search (www.google.com) will provide even more. from what i've read, at any point in time they can freeze your "account" and not let you remove funds from your "balance". though these are banker terms, paypal is not a bank.

please, just read the 6 items going down the side of the page mentioned.

i would not do business with paypal. please tell your friends too. (note, i do not work for paypal, i do not work for a competitor, heck i don't even have a job!)

Originally posted by Imrahil: I've never signed up with PayPal & never really wanted to, but I wanted to donate to the board. From what I can gather, there's a $1.98 initial charge (which gets "refunded", which I will never use, but who cares?), but are there any recurring charges? If you sign up for, say, a one time donation to a board you enjoy, then never use it or even look at it again, are there any downsides (I could put up with being on some mailing list, but I mean real downsides)? Or am I "safe" in signing up just to donate & then won't have to worry about seeing any strange charges appear? Thanks, Imrahil

[ 04-04-2003, 07:52 PM: Message edited by: dulouz ]

[Imrahil]

Hmmm... I looked on the link you provided & this is the only one that really worries me...

"2. Their terms of service are not completely disclosed upon signup and some key "conditions" are not disclosed. No place do they openly tell potential members that their money is 100% at risk. That PayPal can, will, and has in the past, completely cleaned out customers' accounts, (including your checking or savings account) with no appeals process available."

The others I don't much care about b/c I don't intend to ever use them again. But if I were to use a CheckCard I'm concerned about the access to my account.

So...

Can I use a regular Credit Card instead of a CheckCard & be safe? Alternatively, can I use my CheckCard, then, a few days later cancel my PayPal membership (for that matter, how do you cancel?)?

Thanks,
Imrahil

[Pirengle]

Mods, can you bump this to the donations thread or to general?

(WARNING! INCREDIBLY LONG POST AHEAD!)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by dulouz:
a quick google search (www.google.com) will provide even more. from what i've read, at any point in time they can freeze your "account" and not let you remove funds from your "balance". though these are banker terms, paypal is not a bank.

please, just read the 6 items going down the side of the page mentioned.

i would not do business with paypal. please tell your friends too. (note, i do not work for paypal, i do not work for a competitor, heck i don't even have a job!)

Well, I do business with PayPal. I've run eBay auctions through them and even my online store. Care to hear the pro-PayPal argument? [img]smile.gif[/img]

From paypalsucks.com:

PayPal Sucks is an anti paypal site to expose the nightmare of doing business "the paypal way." Post your complaints, troubles, fraud stories, lawsuits, and other dissatisfaction in the forums. Read the links & faq pages for help in resolving your paypal troubles and complaints. Read the options page to find an alternative to paypal, perhaps even get yourself your own merchant account to access credit cards directly. To enumerate the complaints:

1. Their customer service is horrible. They hide their telephone number, (intentionally - by their own admission) and only provide support via "form" emails: As for the customer service, Sollitto said they intentionally make the phone number very difficult to find in order to save costs."

Difficult, yet not impossible. I did call this number when I was setting up my premier account, and the person I talked to was courteous and helpful. I've been through other tech support (FMG, Blizzard, even Interplay), and they weren't as nice. [img]tongue.gif[/img] Maybe I got the nice guy working at the company that day, but I'm not changing my outlook until repeated discourtesy happens.

2. Their terms of service are not completely disclosed upon signup and some key "conditions" are not disclosed. No place do they openly tell potential members that their money is 100% at risk. That PayPal can, will, and has in the past, completely cleaned out customers' accounts, (including your checking or savings account) with no appeals process available.

I did a little browsing of the site to see if the author could give any specifics on the key conditions. Nope. For folks who want the ToS, straight up. This point is one big fat generalization. Sure if you do stupid stuff like sell illegal items or click on fake links, you're going to get burned. (I looked up the "cleaned out customers' accounts" complaint, and found no specifics there, either.

3. If PayPal feels your actions are questionable, PayPal is the investigator, judge, jury and executioner. "Telling your side" of what happened, in most cases seems to be irrelevant. They also refuse to provide you with the details of their investigation and withhold documents they relied upon to make their decisions. Your only contact will be an email that says:

Thank you for contacting PayPal. We apologize for the delay in responding to your service request.

After review, the decision has been made to keep your account locked. This decision cannot be appealed.

If you have any further questions, please reply to this email.

That will be end of it as far as PayPal is concerned. You can email back, but you'll just get more of the same.

This is the only point that gives me pause, as I have never run afoul of PayPal.com. However, if people used common sense, they wouldn't have to answer to that. eBay has a similar one-strike policy; if you have a lot of negative feedback or are caught violating their ToS, you're gone.

4. If you are a bona fide, up-standing individual with hundreds of successful transactions, but someone pays you with a stolen credit card, your account (by PayPal's own admission) is immediately flagged as being "criminal behavior" and any money in that account is confiscated. If a customer "disputes" the charge, same thing happens. (See email above.)

Searched the site, and couldn't find any details to back this one up either.

5. PayPal's fees are now up to 2.9% plus $.35 per transaction. A money order costs $.50 to $1. The bank charges most businesses $.05 to $.12 per check. A good credit card merchant account is about 2.3%. (Plus you can contest chargebacks and have merchant rights.) On a $100 item, PayPal's fee is over $3. At one time, PayPal was the cheapest way to send money, but they are now one of the most expensive, plus you're totally at their mercy in regards to chargebacks.

Well, uh, yeah. The US economy suddenly got flushed down a full toilet, so naturally prices are going to go up. This is the cost of convenience. I'd rather pay their percentage then send a check or money order through the mail. I write checks everywhere I can because most businesses have chargebacks for credit/debit purchases, meaning an extra fee for usage. Places like Wal-Mart, Best Buy, 7-Eleven, have chargebacks of ~$0.25, while some Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) have chargebacks around $2. The few times I *do* use my card is online, and ONLY when I've shaken the site down and made sure it was safe for me to do so.

To go along with this...

6. Money sent from PayPal account to PayPal account is subject to the exact same fees credit card purchases are. Thus every transaction makes PayPal money, but it's nothing more than an entry in a computer database on their system. No money has actually moved.

...it's a cost for using their site/space/bandwidth/operation, pretty much. It's a cost of convenience, and making your transactions safe.

About PayPal's main ToS:[list][*] Users can only hold one personal account and one business or premier account at a time.[*] Not available to minors, people with bad credit, or people suspended from the Paypal service.[*] PayPal acts as a facilitator in third-party money transfers and agent and custodian of your money. Paypal is not an escrow service. (That's why you sign up with escrow.com. [img]tongue.gif[/img] )[*] You don't have to keep any money with PayPal, but if you do, it's kept in a pooled account with other PayPal users at an FDIC-insured bank. FDIC stands for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and was started in the 1930s in the US by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During the 1920s, the stock market crashed and banks didn't have enough funds to cover all the withdrawals to people who wanted their money back. So began the Great Depression, when jobs and money were scarce. To prevent this from happening again, FDR made the FDIC act, which provided government insurance to banks so that they wouldn't go bankrupt again. (This is the short historical version, and I'll wait for everyone to wake back up before I continue. [img]smile.gif[/img] ) Basically, if a bank is FDIC-insured, you can get the same amount of money back that you put into the bank, no matter what.[*] If you have problems with the person on the other end of your money transfer, you can't hold PayPal responsible. This is exactly right. If Joe Schmo cheated you out of your money, it's Joe Schmo you should be suing, not PayPal. Of course, you can always drop PayPal a line and tell them what happened... [*] The service can be used by US residents and residents of 37 other countries. Much of eastern Europe and southern Asia is missing from this list, but it's understandable. The 37 countries on the list (Anguilla, Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom) have relatively stable economies and are less likely to get big economic shakeups.[*] You can't use PayPal to sell anything illegal, gamble or wager, violate copyrights or trademarks, break business laws, present libelous or harassing actions, send viruses, or cause others to lose their PayPal service. Your account will get canned for this.[*] PayPal can close accounts that break its ToS.

While it is true that PayPal's ToS undergoes constant change, users are kept up-to-date on the changes not only with email reminders but they must agree to the changes before making another PayPal transaction.

I tried looking for concrete evidence (read: facts) over all this squawking, and found a healthy layer of bull****. Try reading paypalsucks.com's forum and count the whiners and complainers. Gee, it's like Battle.net's D2X forums when Blizzard announced their enforced cheating ban policies and deleted ~131,000 accounts! Threads like this and [url="http://www.paypalsucks.com/forums/showthread.php?fid=5&tid=1649&old_block=0" this[/url] do NOT inspire confidence in me that this site is doing something for the greater good.

Imrahil, I've donated money through PayPal to Ironworks, and you have nothing to fear from Ziroc or PayPal as long as you're smart and alert. Get familiar with PayPal's terms of service. Don't keep money in PayPal's pooled account to decrease the chance of someone playing with your account. Or, you can make the payment to Z and cancel your account right after.

But the important thing is that you send Z some money to keep Ironworks alive. If you don't feel like PayPal, write him a check.

[dulouz]

Originally posted by Pirengle the BNM: [QB]Mods, can you bump this to the donations thread or to general? (WARNING! INCREDIBLY LONG POST AHEAD!) Well, I do business with PayPal. I've run eBay auctions through them and even my online store. Care to hear the pro-PayPal argument? [img]smile.gif[/img]

:snip:

it seems sellers have a little better perspective than buyers with paypal. not much though.

http://techupdate.zdnet.com/techupda...605840,00.html

here's another site http://www.paypalwarning.com/ThingsY...ee/Default.htm

It's best to make an educated decision. Although you can't believe everything that you read, it's hard to assume that everything is a lie. It's worse to just jump into something without researching it. Just note that the Better Business Bureau has labeled their actions as "Unsatisfactory".

dulouz.

[dulouz]

Sorry, this caught my eye Pirengle.

"[*] You don't have to keep any money with PayPal, but if you do, it's kept in a pooled account with other PayPal users at an FDIC-insured bank. FDIC stands for Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and was started in the 1930s in the US by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. During the 1920s, the stock market crashed and banks didn't have enough funds to cover all the withdrawals to people who wanted their money back. So began the Great Depression, when jobs and money were scarce. To prevent this from happening again, FDR made the FDIC act, which provided government insurance to banks so that they wouldn't go bankrupt again. (This is the short historical version, and I'll wait for everyone to wake back up before I continue. ) Basically, if a bank is FDIC-insured, you can get the same amount of money back that you put into the bank, no matter what."

What you don't get is that the FDIC account is not in your name. *YOU* won't get squat back if the bank happens to go belly up. I'm pretty sure the ammount a person gets back in the case of a bank losing its money is limited to US$200,000. So paypal would get this much back. They are not required to give you anything back since the bank account was not yours.

If you're hedging your bets on this one, i'd find out if this statement by paypal means anything to you.

[Seraph]

Basically, if a bank is FDIC-insured, you can get the same amount of money back that you put into the bank, no matter what.

FDIC-insured means you'll get your money back *eventually*, it can (and often does) takes YEARS for the issues to be resolved. Unless you have a reasonable amount of money in the bank, it often isn't worth the trouble.