Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangrossman | Hacker News Reader

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Since being acquired by eBay they:

* Lowered transaction fees for volume merchants from 2.2% to 1.9%

* Partnered with many of the largest payment gateways to add PayPal to their services

* Introduced PayPal mobile and NFC phone-to-phone payments

* Introduced micropayments

* Introduced two-factor authentication

* Got their European Union banking license and expanded to 100+ countries

* Began offering PayPal Buyer Credit (transactional lines of credit)

* Moved into retail stores, accepting PayPal at credit card terminals in-store

* Began offering a mobile card reader to accept payments into a PayPal account

* Introduced student accounts with parental controls

* Opened their API for development of peer-to-peer payment services

* Introduced virtual, one-time-use credit card numbers

* Began offering merchant gift certificates

* Introduced a "storefront widget" that could be embedded in websites

* Began offering SMS-based authentication

* Began offering a virtual terminal for manually keying in offline/phone orders

* Introduced PayPal Pro and the ability to store payment authorizations you can charge against in the future (i.e. a payment vault with permission controlled by the customer).

All those things are great, but I stopped using them when I realized they can freeze my money, or remove money from a linked checking account for whatever reason they decide and I have almost no recourse except to hire a very expensive lawyer or hope I can start a viral campaign about my money being stolen by Pay Pal.

And since they are not a "bank" they are not regulated by the same laws as other banks, and credit cards.

Bottom line, they lost my trust, and nothing that you have listed regains that trust for me.

That isn't a PayPal thing, it bubbles up from the banks underwriting every PayPal account (Wells Fargo and Chase). It's standard practice in the regulated banking industry, not a sign of a lack of regulation.

My real merchant account, at a company many startups probably use to accept their payments, was flagged as high risk at one point when a string of chargebacks came in from stolen cards someone used over the course of a month. All my processing was funneled into a reserve account and those funds, thousands of dollars, were held for exactly 180 days (6 months), as that's the window in which chargebacks can still occur from previously processed payments.

If you hold this opinion against PayPal, then you should hold it against the entire credit card processing industry. It stems from the root: Visa and MasterCard's Operating Regulations.

The fact that you knew they were held (and would be held) for exactly 180 days puts them above PayPal.

PayPal holds funds from a suspended account for exactly 180 days. It's the same policy because it comes from the same source.

> We may close, suspend, or limit your access to your Account or the PayPal Services, and/or limit access to your funds for up to 180 Days if you violate this Agreement, the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, or any other agreement you enter into with PayPal

-- PayPal User Agreement

They can remove funds from your account for any reason and in any quantity. Not freeze. Remove. Your only recourse is to pursue them in court.

Of course, they put a wonderful provision in that agreement you quoted. You can only pursue them in court in the state of California and Nebraska. Ask me how I know.

Is that how a bank would act? I don't think so.

Is that how a bank would act? Yes, that's exactly how they act. When you get a chargeback, they remove the funds (and a chargeback fee) directly from your bank account. That's the only place they could come from, since you don't hold a balance like you do at PayPal. Settled payments get deposited into the account, refunds and chargebacks and fees get withdrawn, once a day 5 days a week.

As for restricting venue, yes, that's also something banks would do. It's a standard term in most contracts, let alone most merchant service agreements. Here's the agreement for First Data, one of the world's largest merchant account providers. It's also the same agreement you sign for Intuit Merchant Services. You've probably heard of Intuit; QuickBooks, Quicken, TurboTax, Mint, etc. It restricts venue to Ontario.

http://www.firstdata.com/downloads/international/fdims-1202....

PayPal does not have the ability or authority to steal people's money "for any reason and in any quantity". That's ridiculous. You're spreading lies while admitting not to know how it works anywhere else. We don't do that here on HN.

> Is that how a bank would act? Yes, that's exactly how they act. When you get a chargeback

I wasn't talking about chargebacks.

> PayPal does not have the ability or authority to steal people's money

They have the ability and they couldn't care less about having the authority to do so. Largely, because the majority of their customers can't pursue them in court. They also limit any arbitration to 10K. If you read the user agreement, it's all right there, in black and white.

> You're spreading lies while admitting not to know how it works anywhere else.

I sincerely hope you keep a balance with them. So that you can find out from experience, as I did.

I do keep a balance with them. I have for the past 12 years.

http://i.imgur.com/FWgxP.png

You've obviously had a bad experience with them. That sucks, really. And I won't tell you not to hold a grudge against them for whatever that was. It helps no one to use that as an excuse to claim they haven't innovated as a company in 10 years, that they have unlimited rights to steal, that their contract isn't essentially identical to other merchant services agreements, and then to wish ill on me personally for pointing that out.

Like I said, you'll find out. I heard the same stories and dismissed them. I kept a balance with them in the 6 figures because of the relatively high interest rate I was getting in the money market account (when they had it). Then they froze my account. No biggie, right? I'll just wait 6 months. Still getting the high interest rate. Before they unfroze the account, they took a chunk out of it. Only about 10%, but it was still quite a bit of cash. No explanations, just email stating the obvious. My recourse? Nothing. They refuse to speak to you, only by letter. Letter gets a response 6 months after the fact and it's just a form letter pretty much acknowledging receipt. Like I said, you'll find out. If you do business with a local bank, at least you can take them to court if there's a problem. With PayPal? Good luck.

* Introduced virtual, one-time-use credit card numbers

Where is it?

It was discontinued after about 4 years.

Well that's my point.

Not only was it unoriginal, but it was discontinued.

A payment method that:

* Can be used on any website that accepts credit cards

* Cannot be used to sign you up for a subscription through scams or hidden terms

* Cannot be charged more than the amount you intended to spend

* Can be set to expire after a short time

* Can be funded by bank transfer, eCheck, credit card or funds through selling items on eBay or your own website

* Is available instantly with just a few clicks

...was absolutely both unique and innovative. It existed nowhere else and offered compelling benefits. And they ran with it for 4 years. Innovative does not mean guaranteed to succeed, be profitable, and stay around forever.

Either you're not very imaginative when considering what it took to create this offering, the risks and costs involved, and what benefits it implied, or you have a petty bias against anything attached to the PayPal name. Either way, you've made no point.

You seem to be a Paypal fanboy.

Paypal was not the first to invent disposable credit cards.

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-245428.html

So you were saying?

Apple was not first to invent MP3 players or tablets. Amex's program was discontinued. Were you trying to attack your own two petty arguments against the one bullet point you decided to pull out of a broader comment?

What I was saying is that you're being petty and your comments were pointless. I'm still saying it. I made that quick list of things PayPal has tried because the parent commenters were "honestly curious" if PayPal has done anything since the eBay acquisition. They clearly have. Picking off a point and going "but that was discontinued" doesn't add a darned thing to the conversation.

It is fairly evident that you have an extreme PayPal bias and that you are arguing in desperation rather than logic.

Take a moment to think about the fact that you cited something completely un-innovative. Then think about the fact that not only was Paypal 6 years late to the party, but they couldn't even maintain it for more than 4 years.

Thus not only proving whatever extra "innovation" they had for their clone was not very innovative, they also failed on the execution. And to top it off, there are still others offering it.

And if you are going to argue that anything unique is innovative, I have a lollipop attached to wheels with a whistle at the center of the stick to sell you.

Hyperanalyzing the one bullet point is itself the petty and pointless act. Whether PayPal has done anything innovative in 10 years does not hinge on whether virtual MasterCard numbers worked out for them. It was a quick comment, written in 2 minutes, that you're now attempting to pull apart a single sentence of under a microscope. It's an ultimate display of pedantry.

Everyone else got the point, the ridiculousness of the implication that the company has been stagnant since the eBay acquisition, while in reality they've pushed every boundary of the original company -- geographically into every continent, web to mobile to brick-and-mortar, peer-to-peer personal into merchant services, mid-ticket to up to volume and down to micropayments, service to platform provider with PayPal X.

The whole original story got 87 votes. My quick comment rebuffing the idea PayPal has been stagnant got over 50. Most people seemed to appreciate the information it conveyed, imperfectly as any top-of-the-head list written in 2 minutes would. Only you felt the need to pull off a bullet point and make quips about it. You missed the point.

I spent 10 seconds writing the reply to the 1 bullet because that is what I knew about off the top of my head. I am not going to waste 20 minutes researching all your other bullet points that you probably just as sloppily cobbled together just to win an Internet argument.

It really doesn't matter if the original story got 87 votes, it is not an anti-paypal piece. It has become quite apparent that you are so desperate to win this debate that you can't even make a logical argument.

You would not have to research any of them unless you believed I was making it up, and PayPal did not enter retail, mobile, micropayments, platforms, etc. All innovating means is making changes in something established, trying new things. PayPal innovated itself. It's not the same company today as it was pre-eBay; it's entered new countries, new channels, new lines of business. That's the answer to the question of whether PayPal has innovated since eBay. There was never a debate. Nobody else saw a debate; I'm not trying to win one, just frustratedly curious why you are trying to create one, and letting that frustration get the better of me when I should just be ignoring it.

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