18 thoughts on “PayPal – is the internet giant a force for good?

  1. I have abandoned things in my cart many times due to problems with PayPal. They are mainly caused by my nomadic life with problems of debit cards registered in different countries and multiple addresses. It is like all of the others a monopoly, in the end we are forced to register and use it as some (many) transactions only accept that form of payment. As the graph shows the Internet does not necessarily increase choice, but it certainly createsd large corporations.

    • Christopher Roberts

      Naively, I never really considered the mobility issues.

      I believe PayPal was probably set up with good intentions, however like most things that get ‘big’ it lost its way. I am sure most project are started with good intentions, or is that just me being naive – again?

  2. PayPal goes where the money is … so it’s likely they will add whatever services will generate the most income for PayPal. But it is a useful alternative for merchants not wanting to pay the high fees to maintain a merchant account in order to accept credit cards.

    • Christopher Roberts

      Agreed.

      Good for users, yes, but they have only spent the money innovating it, as it will be very profitable!

  3. Here in Sri Lanka PayPay is send only, meaning you can send money but you can’t receive money. One thing I don’t like about the service is it’s restricting and freezing policies. Sometimes it can take weeks to lift restriction, even though it’s a send only account.

  4. My business uses Paypal exclusively for customers to pay for their purchases. One issue we have is in that we sell digital products, once the payment goes through the customer can download their purchase. The downfall is, if for whatever reason they decide it wasn’t worth their money (and we are talking as low as $2.99!) they can and have (I believe a few times in 6 years) contacted their credit card company and then WE the ones accepting PayPal for payment are charged a fee. I think this is unfair, especially when it comes to people who claim that they didn’t authorize the purchase. That is something PayPal should absorb the cost of after all they were the ones that let the payment go through. Also we have noticed that somewhere/somehow certain individuals are able to get an account very quickly. Over and over again in a hacking situation people from over seas are able to snatch up an account almost over night. While there are many good points to PayPal, there are a few they could tweak and work on before and if they ever do get into more of a banking aspect.

    • Christopher Roberts

      I am sure it is people like you Ron, who wonder why the fees are so high, when the service they provide could clearly be improved!

      Thanks for adding your view, great to have you join the community 🙂
      Christopher – Admin Team

  5. I haven’t used PayPal much but as the figure goes, it sure is gaining a lot of popularity. Its charges are a bit high. But the upcoming features PayPal Here sounds great. It will be very useful for customers. Thanks for all his info. Great post.

  6. The Paypal transactional charges are not much different to the fees charged by credit card companies. In addition, if you are a small business and you want to process credit cards the banks will try to lock you into a 2 year contract with cancellation fees. On the downside, as Jonny has pointed out the Paypal process can be quite clunky and cause people to abandon shopping carts.

  7. Hi Christopher,

    Indeed Paypal may seem to be too strict with most of their policies but considering what they offer, most of these things have be in place to guide against fraud. Also, on the prohibitive charges, they are not really different from what merchant account providers offer. I think for a small online business using paypal may be more economical in the long run.

    Btw. it’s great to be here and seeing that you are still going great is a pleasure!

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