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Comment by gergles | Hacker News Reader

Wow, that's histrionic.

PayPal's customers are the people who use it. You, as a merchant, are not a customer of theirs, but a necessary evil to keep the customers coming. PayPal's customers love it. PayPal's merchants don't like it because PayPal has fraud prevention methods that are opaque and hamfistedly applied. That's a fine complaint, but this breathless "for the sake of the world don't ever use PayPal" garbage is pretty ridiculous.

If you want to do anything beyond selling tangible goods or simple subscriptions, you should probably reevaluate using PayPal to do that. PayPal isn't the best product for everything, and frankly, I'm sick of every merchant doing some crazy scheme (seriously, "give us money and maybe we'll send you a gift of some unspecified value in the future"? can you fucking spell "chargeback"?) bitching and moaning into the HN echo chamber whenever PayPal tells them to stop that.

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> but this breathless "for the sake of the world don't ever use PayPal"

You know, I've been working on my condescension. I really have – my last girlfriend hated that shit. And it's gotten a lot better. But you just had to use a cutely loaded little word like "histrionic," so there's really no other course...

So what I'd like to do now is offer a brief explanation of how quotation marks work.

Generally, quotation marks are used to attribute their contained content, verbatim, to a specific person. By including words in quotation marks you are saying, in effect, "this person said precisely this."

I did not say precisely what you quoted. What I said instead (handily, the text is right there), was that for all our futures, where we is a group of people who care about building things and getting paid, that we shouldn't pin our hopes on a company that can declare our money limbo-ed on a whim. The more who avoid PayPal as a result of their flakiness, the brighter the future looks for a sane payment processing landscape.

It's okay to have policies. It's okay to have business models you will and won't support. What isn't okay is to both handle large sums of people's money and make your customer service a recourse-free black box at the same time.

> A single word or a short phrase may be enclosed in quotation marks to indicate ironic use.

http://www.wikihow.com/Use-Quotation-Marks-Correctly

I think it was pretty clear that this was the case, when I read it didn't make me think that you said that.

> A single word or a short phrase may be enclosed in quotation marks to indicate ironic use.

Normally, yes. But the primary use of quotation marks is to quote - in a direct response to something someone wrote, you come across as either dishonest or stupid if you claim to be using them ironically.

When I read gergles's comment, it was clear to me that he was describing a class of sentiment, and not directly quoting who he replied to. The manner in which he did it is, to me, idiomatic English.

Firstly, you've got it backwards. Paypal takes a cut of the merchant's revenues for virtually passing the money from the consumer to the merchant; therefore, the merchant is PayPal's customer, and the consumers the necessary evil.

Secondly, PayPal didn't simply say "stop that". They gave him the runaround, froze unrelated accounts, and stonewalled him when he tried to make whatever accommodations would please them. That they were rude and condescending during all of this only adds insult to injury.

"Don't ever use PayPal" is really a reasonable reaction to these sorts of stories. When a seemingly legitimate transaction can unexpectedly invite the fury of paypal's overzealous fraud protection drones, how could the reaction be anything but?

Actually, the merchants ARE the customers. The people who buy using pay pal aren't the ones paying the fees. Without merchants accepting PayPal, then no one would use PayPal. I am transitioning my own company away from PayPal -- we're going to use chargify for recurring and braintree for everything else. PayPal can go to hell. They've been treating us like criminals because we are located in China, are incorporated in Nevada, have a DC phone number and a California bank account. They don't seem to understand global businesses. They're a step below retarded. We've had our accounts frozen multiple times and don't respond to emails. I hate PayPal and as soon as I can get their crap disintangled from our web application code, we're done with them. We get better customer device from China's Union Pay and that is a state owned black hole of a company. At least they respond to emails and don't lock our account everytime I log in from a hotel room on the road.

Have you ever tried calling them? They have giant call centers of people who actually answer phones, they have seriously short hold times, and are capable of escalating tickets up the chain pretty rapidly by just forwarding your call around their internal departments.

However, that's not the only option. Do you have an account on their merchant services support site? Have you talked to them about getting a dedicated account manager? Did you ever spend the time to calmly and happily explain to them your situation, and then get that information stored with your account details so others later will see it when they go to help you?

This experience of saying that PayPal doesn't respond is simply so far and away unlike my experience (where I am, if anything, I often feel inundated with communication from PayPal, having been dragged into hour-long conference calls with underwriting, or having to carefully explain my business model multiple times to different people) that I'd really like to understand what causes the differences.

First, the merchants are the customers - they're the ones paying the fees to provide the service to their customers.

Second, you don't have to be a merchant to hate PayPal. Most of the time I will simply choose not to buy something rather than use PayPal. --The last time I couldn't avoid them was about 2 years ago.

>Second, you don't have to be a merchant to hate PayPal.

Exactly. I refuse to use it more due to ethical reasons[1] than anything else, but there are a metric shit-ton of reasons for not supporting and using Paypal.

We need more (viable) alternatives. Paypal is a bit like Windows - it gained a monopoly because it was successful early on due to the lack of viable competition, and now we are at a point where we need to get rid of that monopoly, but it's difficult to do so - but we must.

[1] See the Wikileaks blockade, amongst other things. It's by far not the first time they pulled that shit, the WL incident just was the worst example so far.

And I would add that their fraud methods don't work either. My account was emptied in several fraud transactions and for the number of transaction and the amount you could see very clear that they were guessing my paypal balance. For example they started with $100 transations until they got insufficient balance error and then tried with $20, at the end they made 7 transactions of $1.

For paypal those were legitimate payments, even when they were made from a different country, which they could check but were too lazy to try. At the end they accepted that there were a fraud, but do you know how much they refund? 5 of the 7 transactions of $1.

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