This is how you check your PayPal card balance in Italy in 2017

The form and the app UI in general, is designed like it explicitly wants to go against all commonly accepted look & feel defaults.

As if someone who was completely not qualified for this had to complete it in half an hour.

And it's PayPal! Well not exactly PayPal, but the company which provided the Italian PayPal card, which is called Lottomatica. But PayPal should require some minimum quality standards, shouldn't they?

You can see how drastic is the change when browsing from the PayPal page to this one, from the link below and then clicking on the top right "home banking" button.

https://www.paypal.com/it/webapps/mpp/prepaid-discover

It really leaves me with the feeling that the attitude of the Italian company is: "hey we're letting you check your PayPal card balance without charging you anything, so you get what you pay for".

In Italy, banks, TLC companies and other big companies, charge for stuff that you don't see in other countries. For example initially when filling up your phone credit, say 10 euros, you had to pay 2 euros for "fixed costs", so that real credit was 8 euros. This was later considered illegal. Or the case of banks which charge you for non existent costs per year, just because they've always done so.

And when these big companies are forced to adequate to the rest of Western world, being forced to give the user free services (like letting them check their balance, or change your PIN) they do that in the laziest possible way. Also to transfer money between my PayPal account and my Italian PayPal card, I had to wait 2 full days, while I'm sure that in other countries it could take at maximum some hours.

I really would like that some spotlights would be pointed at them and make them ashamed for all the frustration they cause to their customers and this general attitude these local companies have here.