Paypal - Your Thoughts?

I think paypal is brilliant, and i feel most secure using Paypal.

How about you guys ?

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If somewhere uses PayPal it’s usually my choice of payment. Think it’s because it’s very easy to use, I can choose to pay after delivery or put it on my paypal credit.

The only thing that usually trumps PayPal is if Klarna is offered (ASOS, JD etc) as that allows for payment a month after delivery but integrates in so if you return clothing it is taken off the amount.

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I don’t have a strong feeling either way. I use PayPal because it’s tied to eBay.

Their customer support is pretty shocking, though. Any time I’ve had an issue (and maybe things are better than they used to be) I feel like I’ve had to jump through several hoops to even get a simple answer.

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I don’t mind PayPal. I also have PayPal Credit for Section 75 protection as credit card’s don’t have it within it.

I don’t have a PayPal account, and won’t get one. I Guest Checkout if I’m buying through eBay.

I had a PayPal account years ago, but it was set up for my business and personal use. I had both my personal and business accounts connected to it.

Multiple times, I made a purchase directing the money to come from one account, and PayPal actually took the funds from the other - despite the one I requested definitely having the funds available. So, for example, I would make a large personal purchase and they would take the funds from my business account, even though my personal account had the funds needed to cover the purchase. This would leave my business account in a mess, and cause chaos with my records. As a result I left PayPal and will never join them again.

Yes, it’s convenient and I’d love another similar service to grow as big, but no payment provider should be able to pick and choose which of your bank accounts they take your money from.

I used to love PayPal and I’ll still normally use them for more shady merchants or perhaps larger purchases.

Nowadays I just prefer to use my Monzo card directly. It’s faster and looks nicer on the summary screen since you get the proper logo/name etc.

Paypal does that for me, I just bought something via paypal and it has the company name and logo on my home page ( on monzo )

Ah, nice.

I think it must still be weird with subscription payments.

I don’t avoid PayPal, but if it’s a choice between it and just entering your card, I prefer to use my card. There are a couple of places where I use it, one of my web hosts only lets you use your card if you send them ID first as apparently they had a lot of issues with stolen cards being used which isn’t an issue for them with PayPal, but I think that’s it. Occasionally some retailers have offers for using PayPal though I’ve not seen any of those in a while.

I still get a weekly ‘Your PayPal summary’ email, which I find very annoying when I know I’ve not used it in weeks or months, I should figure out how to turn that off.

I hate PayPal.

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As a personal customer, they’re okay. They have some pretty questionable business tactics though. I’d happily see them disappear to the likes of Google Pay and Apple Pay. I think it’s likely in the next few years their few selling points will begin erode. They were obviously once very innovative, but I feel they are super legacy nowadays.

As a business customer, purely from a technical perspective, they are (were) awful. Trying to integrate their multiple legacy API’s was a nightmare. Different business functions were built behind newer (or older) API’s. Some used OAuth and others not, some used REST, some used just NVP after auth and some if I remember correctly sent back XML? So you’d have to authenticate with different endpoints by different methods, and need different keys etc. Awful awful API’s. It might have changed now but I wouldn’t ever consider using them. Once I found Stripe I fell in love :heart_eyes:

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Their APIs are still confusing. They could be a lot worse though.

Nothing compared to Stripe though. The Stripe team really are killing it with their user & developer friendliness and their amazing design team.

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That is one thing that annoys me about them. Their service email options are very limited. Apparently you can contact CS to have them alter them. I just have a mail rule which marks as read and files them

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PayPal are a PITA. I had to contact customer support to finish setting up my Monzos card with them, and I still can’t delete my old account (and neither can they) because of a non existent upcoming payment.

For ages as well using PayPal on a mobile with 2FA setup was a whole world of pain, to be fair that’s a lot better now.

I much prefer Google pay, it just works.

Their API is such a mess! Nothing makes sense, and the documentation is even wrong in some cases, leaving you scratching your head. I hate them! (and yet I use them all the time…)

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I find it super clunky. I only use it to force people to take Amex.

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Rates for payment processing if you’re a merchant are also shocking

I hate it.

Paypal’s customer service is an absolute nightmare, and they are also very bad in terms of privacy, sharing your data with hundreds of different companies. This reminds me that I need to delete that account since I no longer need it.

Oh and also, they are just as bad with their business clients. I worked at a business that used them for payments processing and putting a considerable sum of money through them each day, and despite that, their API would regularly timeout when doing transactions (we had to hack together a retry mechanism ourselves), and sometimes behave against their own documentation (it says the max payment amount is 10000$, how come a transaction - fraudulent obviously - authorised for one million?).

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I think I just use it for the odd thing off eBay. If more sites used Google Pay/Apple Pay I’d just use that. It’s more a convenience thing than a security thing for me.

For all those that dislike it, you’ll be pleased to know eBay is changing to Adyen later this year / early next. Read More

I don’t like how bad the 2FA was on Paypal, for ages it didn’t support eBay and both parties suggested to just disable 2FA. I imagine it now works okay though :stuck_out_tongue:

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