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Comment by coderdude | Hacker News Reader

I'd wager that most of the people you see bagging on PayPal have:

1) Never used them in a business capacity

2) Have only read horror stories

3) Take those stories at face value

The horror stories usually have an obvious, "duh" kind of reasoning behind them when you step back and think about it from PayPal's point of view. Big influx of sales out of nowhere? That's a flagging. Accepting money for some kind of charity? That's a flagging.

I'm very satisfied with their service. They work to protect your money, your customers' money, and their reputation. If you're an entrepreneur and you aren't sure what payment processor to go with, don't exclude PayPal from consideration.

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I've been taking payments with PayPal for 13 years this June. I feel exactly the same. Not only has their service and support always been excellent for me, they're by far the most economical option, at first glance (the effective transaction rate is lower than any other 3rd party processor, or the 3 traditional merchant account providers I've used), and on closer scrutiny (the fraud screening and dispute resolution mean I keep more of the money I get paid through PayPal than by credit card directly).

That's a lot longer than I've been using them so it's good to hear that I've backed the right horse. The reduced fees for volume processing can save you a decent amount of money over time (2.2% vs. 2.9%). I also like that I'm not restricted to only PayPal users but can also accept credit card and eCheck payments as well.

I agree with this sentiment for having over 4 years of heavy use. They have plenty of things that need updating (slow history, API sucks), but at least I get great support if I have trouble and need to call. The 2.2% fees aren't bad; not a great rate either, but it's keeping me from moving to Stripe, which has worse fees. Note that I have a traditional ecommerce store who sells real physical items.

Additionally, I'll bet that none of them have experienced the special horror of maintaining a traditional merchant account and dealing with that kind of inflexibility. That's not even bringing PCI compliance issues into it. Believe me there's a reason PayPal got as popular as they are. The alternatives (minus the new services like Stripe) are far, far worse.

Definitely agree. The only unfortunate thing is that they haven't taken the past 4+ years to develop a JSON/REST/anything API that is easy to use for developers. Their current API is full of holes, issues, bugs, random error codes, etc. They could make a wrapper API that they absorb 99% of this headache from and it'd be a much better service.

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