There's been a lot of PayPal hating on HN. I'm not trying to defend the horrible things that I've heard, but I, for one, am a happy PayPal customer. We've regularly moved thousands upon thousands of dollars a day for the last decade without any major issues. #YMMV
They seem to really hate any and all pre-sales, plus they have a list of "risk items" - if you're lucky not to fall into one of those categories, it's a happy life with Paypal for you :-).
Then there's their automated fraud prevention system that is just too trigger happy. As an example: I bought an item on eBay the other week and they refused to process the payment. A couple of days later I decided to try again before buying from another seller and it went through without issues.
Based on what's said, it seems that businesses/groups that raise large sums of money sporadically trigger the most problems.
If you're running an on-going business that has multiple to many transactions everyday over long periods of time, then I suspect that you're less likely to trigger these problems. But again, YMMV.
There are countless tales of eBay parties having their funds frozen. I've personally had around a dozen influxes of a couple hundred dollars at a time be frozen for 4-6 weeks before I had access to their full balances.
Additionally, many have issues with the fees. Going back to eBay, you get hit with fees for both services, and I think many just see it as being too much given other emerging comparable services.
> There are countless tales of eBay parties having their funds frozen.
"I used ebay, something went wrong, here's my post" vs "I used ebay, everything went smoothly, here's my post".
Obviously you're going to have many more posts where things go wrong, but that doesn't tell you anything about the total number of transactions, nor the successful transactions.
Of course. You'd be hard pressed to find a scenario on the web where selection bias doesn't come into play. Regardless, there's a level of distinction between "I had a bad experience" and "Paypal has inexplicably frozen my funds."
I agree that there are numerous positive experiences out there. I would imagine PayPal would struggle if there wasn't a large user base that was satisfied. The point here is that some people are starting to reassess and or question the net-benefit offered by PayPal at the cost of these inconveniences.
