PayPal Question

[Pointer19]

My understanding of PayPal is fuzzy. Half of what I read online contradicts the other half.

In your experience, is PayPal the safest way to sell things online? I'm selling tickets and read that PayPal will hold the buyer's money until after the game (two months away). I've also heard that buyers can renege on the deal even after the tickets have been transferred to them.

What do you know?

[BWillie]

My understanding of PayPal is fuzzy. Half of what I read online contradicts the other half.

In your experience, is PayPal the safest way to sell things online? I'm selling tickets and read that PayPal will hold the buyer's money until after the game (two months away). I've also heard that buyers can renege on the deal even after the tickets have been transferred to them.

What do you know?

It's never happened to me, but I've heard that there can apparently be ways to chargeback the transaction. I don't know how that works though.

Why not use bitcoin instead?

[Simply Red]

they'll side w/ the buyer just like Ebay - only ever so SLIGHTLY less so.

[BryanBusby]

I refuse to accept paypal payments anymore and haven't taken it for years.

[BlackHelicopters]

Avoid PayPal like the bubonic plague.

[FlaChief58]

Avoid PayPal like the bubonic plague.

Why? Is your opinion seller or buyer based? I've been using paypal for years and have never had an issue

[DaneMcCloud]

I refuse to accept paypal payments anymore and haven't taken it for years.

Me, too. I don't mind paying through Paypal but I will no longer accept it as a form of payment.

[BWillie]

Dunno why you guys dislike Paypal so much. I like Bitcoin better but Paypal and Venmo both serve a purpose. Just don't let people pay you with credit card as you'll get a fee, otherwise it seems like a great platform for exchanging small sums of money quickly.

[BryanBusby]

Dunno why you guys dislike Paypal so much. I like Bitcoin better but Paypal and Venmo both serve a purpose. Just don't let people pay you with credit card as you'll get a fee, otherwise it seems like a great platform for exchanging small sums of money quickly.
There's next to zero protection as a seller. If you were doing transactions in the hundreds to thousands, like me, that's a big problem.

Even if you follow every step to a T, the buyer could say their account/card was compromised, do a chargeback and you better believe PP made you eat the loss.

I make people pay me via WU now. There are steps you can take to lower your risk, but fuck is it not worth all the hassle.

[ghak99]

I purchase and pass gifts with it all the time, but I'm to the point I'm ready to quit accepting Paypal as payment. You can do everything right and some stupid fuck can just decide to screw with you.

It's probably not a company I should be supporting anyways, but it became a necessary evil.

[DRU]

PayPal is a merchant account provider like any other. If you are accepting payments online, you have risk of chargebacks. It's that simple.

All the different merchant account providers follow their own rules based on their own experiences about how risky a particular account might be depending on the seller's credit, the type of products they're selling, and a wide variety of other things.

Sometimes you'll see a merchant account provider completely deny you from using their service. Sometimes they'll let you process payments, but they'll hold your funds for a period of time before releasing them to you. Other times you'll get most of your funds instantly, but every once in a while they might hold funds for an individual transaction because it raises red flags for one reason or another.

Regardless of all of that, if a buyer funds their payment with a credit card they can call their card company and file a chargeback at any time. Card company's will issue a "temporary refund pending investigation" instantly to the buyer, and this goes back down the chain and can come out of your PayPal account if that happens.

There IS an investigation, though. All too often people don't follow the standard procedures for these investigations, and even more often they do, but they learn that they simply made some sort of a mistake that keeps them from winning the dispute. Rather than accept that, though, they claim that "PayPal sucks" and push blame elsewhere.

WU is an option, but it's a hassle, it's time consuming, and it limits your potential buyers big time.

Whatever you're selling, whether it's with PayPal or any other merchant account provider, you need to follow these standard procedures.

- NEVER ship to an address that does not match the address on the credit card. This comes back as "Address Verification Match" or "Confirmed Address" or any other similar term depending on who you're accepting payments with.

- Don't ship/deliver if the card security code response comes back as a mis-match or not provided.

- Always ship with signature required, especially on items $200+.

- Always whip via trackable service.

- If delivering a digital product, always keep copies of emails sent, barcodes used, verification emails from transferred ticketmaster tickets or the like, etc. Digital goods can be very tough to win disputes with ANY merchant provider, so you should call the buyer. Talk to them on the phone, get a feel for them and make sure nothing seems fishy. In almost all cases, if it's going to go bad, you'll be able to tell by talking to them and you can simply decide not to risk the sale.

If you follow all of those steps and a dispute comes up, you'll be able to provide plenty of evidence that you've delivered the product. In the case of physical goods, the credit card company would at least require that the buyer show proof of delivery on returning the goods back to the seller before they close the case. If that doesn't happen they would take the funds back and give it back to the seller. I've seen this happen many times.

You won't win every case. If you're selling tickets one time, you follow these procedures, and you still get burned somehow then that would be very unlucky, but also very unlikely.

If you're selling a lot of stuff and you're dealing with lots of disputes then you've got something wrong with your process.

[BryanBusby]

I think your bias is showing.

WU isn't really a hassle, time consuming or really limits your customer base. They can send you money, like paypal, without ever leaving the house and the seller doesn't have to worrt about fees.

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, picking up in a timely fashion is also easy.

When it comes to chargebacks, if there is an "investigation" than it's a laughable process. I've never seen a seller win that, once. It comes down to paypal just lost some money and you better believe that they will recoup that money. However it takes.

I always made customers verify their e-mail, phone number and made them send me an image of their drivers license before I would take it in the past. It made sure that I never was scammed, but it's an easier and much more streamlined process for them to just spend a few more bucks (I never ate the pp fees) and sent it wu.

I understand that PayPal needs to have some things in place to protect buyers and they should. The problem is PP is very pro-buyer and anti-seller in that regard and really I'd rather take my chances on Craigslist with a fuy that says bring cash, come alone and meet me in a dark alleyway at 11 pm.

If you really believe all that, than I invite you to become a power seller that uses pp. After a year of it you'll wonder why the fuck you ever accepted it. I don't think PP is a mass evil company and the policies were made with good intentions. People are just fucking assholes and will abuse anything that they can for money.

[SAUTO]

Any credit card will charge back the money in a dispute.

Even if you physically run it.

[Dave Lane]

Paypal is awesome take 100s of transactions a year and no issues in last 10-15 years

[BWillie]

There's next to zero protection as a seller. If you were doing transactions in the hundreds to thousands, like me, that's a big problem.

Even if you follow every step to a T, the buyer could say their account/card was compromised, do a chargeback and you better believe PP made you eat the loss.

I make people pay me via WU now. There are steps you can take to lower your risk, but **** is it not worth all the hassle.

How long after the transaction can there be a chargeback? I don't do any ebay selling.

[Iowanian]

My only issue with oaypal is the fees.

[DRU]

I think your bias is showing.

WU isn't really a hassle, time consuming or really limits your customer base. They can send you money, like paypal, without ever leaving the house and the seller doesn't have to worrt about fees.

Unless you live in the middle of nowhere, picking up in a timely fashion is also easy.

When it comes to chargebacks, if there is an "investigation" than it's a laughable process. I've never seen a seller win that, once. It comes down to paypal just lost some money and you better believe that they will recoup that money. However it takes.

I always made customers verify their e-mail, phone number and made them send me an image of their drivers license before I would take it in the past. It made sure that I never was scammed, but it's an easier and much more streamlined process for them to just spend a few more bucks (I never ate the pp fees) and sent it wu.

I understand that PayPal needs to have some things in place to protect buyers and they should. The problem is PP is very pro-buyer and anti-seller in that regard and really I'd rather take my chances on Craigslist with a fuy that says bring cash, come alone and meet me in a dark alleyway at 11 pm.

If you really believe all that, than I invite you to become a power seller that uses pp. After a year of it you'll wonder why the **** you ever accepted it. I don't think PP is a mass evil company and the policies were made with good intentions. People are just ****ing assholes and will abuse anything that they can for money.

I am not bias towards PayPal for any reason other than in my 15+ years of experience dealing with payment processing they are the best for many reasons. If somebody else was better, I'd be using them and talking about them the same way.

If you've ever done any split testing of different payment methods on a website with substantial traffic you would see that only offering WU will GREATLY reduce your conversion rates.

As for the fees, the seller may not have to worry about them, but the buyer does, and that's one of the things that rubs buyers the wrong way. If you're doing this on a regular basis, regardless of where you live, going to pick up the payments is a hassle. Extra trips to places where human beings have additional opportunities to waste your time (money) and damage your property (vehicle in transit and in the parking lot) is a hassle.

If it's a one time thing and there are plenty of buyers willing to do it, then sure, it's a fine option. The question seems to be more broad than that, though, so I am offering a broad answer.

I have not been a power seller myself, but I have worked directly with many of the top sellers on eBay doing hundreds of thousands or even millions per month in sales. They all use PayPal very successfully.

I actually developed a custom calculator, too, which would compare PayPal to all of their top competing merchant account providers. This is something that none of those companies can provide (or at least won't show you.)

We did secret shopping to negotiate rates with all the different competitors based on the different types of volume we typically deal with. We were then able to run all the transaction history for the merchants through the calculator, and it would factor in the type of card, the AVS response, the CVV2 response (plus hundreds of other variables that determine the actual rate you pay on any individual transaction). It would then output the total fees you would have paid for all the different competitors vs. what they paid with PayPal.

PayPal won 85% of the time. The only time they lost were in cases where the company had a large retail / trade show presence and were doing a majority of physical card transactions, which are much cheaper than online / keyed transactions. PayPal treats everything as "online" though, regardless of who you process it. So they do lose in those cases, however, it's still advised in those cases to use something else for the card-present transactions and PayPal online.

So to sum it all up, if you're selling online on a regular basis, you want the widest range of potential buyers possible with the lowest fees over all, PayPal is going to be your best bet. Dealing with chargebacks / disputes will be the same with PayPal as any other merchant account provider.