Paypal - Your Thoughts?

Yes, two factor authentication works quickly and easily these days.

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PayPal is good and convenient as a buyer, but if you run into any troubles that require you to contact customer service… good luck actually managing to speak to a customer service agent. Calling sends you on numerous dead ends even if you’ve opened a support request.

As a seller, the fees are pretty big (biggest pain is selling on Depop though, since it’s 10%+3% or whatever) and if the buyer says they haven’t received it even if you have proof of postage or tracking they usually default in favour of the buyer :weary: maybe I’m just unlucky! It’s one of those services that are good until it blows up in your face spectacularly and you find out how bad it is… but you can’t exactly avoid PayPal when purchasing things online.

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but you can’t exactly avoid PayPal when purchasing things online

Why is that? Personally I always get by with just a card, even on eBay which internally uses PayPal but allows checkout without creating an account. Depop was actually the only reason I made a PayPal account.

Only thing I ever used PayPal for was when it was the only payment eBay would take

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There are lots of blogshops I buy from in Singapore or sellers who prefer to use PayPal. Depop is defo one of the reasons why I use mine. I think in the initial stages you had to have a PayPal account, maybe it’s expanded to bank account details lately? Not sure. Usually if the transaction is in a different currency I skip their horrible conversion rate and use Monzo directly though.

I am not a huge fan of PayPal ever since they asked me to delete my account and create it again as they were unable to change my country. Not friendly to expats at all. (I ended up with two accounts if you wander what I did)

I think in the initial stages you had to have a PayPal account, maybe it’s expanded to bank account details lately?

You mean on Depop? They used to have their own in-house “wallet” which was great because they had full control of the transactions, but they since switched to Paypal and personally I found it a nightmare, even purely on the technical side of things, but the main issue is that they now rely on Paypal’s awesome (:joy:) customer service as their main method of “buyer protection”, which IMO is a big downgrade from the early days of Depop Wallet.

In any case, Depop are cracking down on out-of-app payments, partly due to the huge amount of scams where bad guys put up products that don’t even exist, ask for a bank transfer payment (to avoid the 10% fee) and then disappear. You would think that a fraudulent bank transfer should be easy to reverse (in fact, I personally trust an UK bank more than a Paypal account, since the latter is tied to an identity, while a Paypal can be opened by anyone under a fake name), but clearly neither UK police nor Action Fraud cares about those scams.

Oh I didn’t know that, I must have mixed it up then. I know they switched the way you accepted payment a little after I joined and you had to have a PayPal account with it.

I found that so jarring, when I purchased something on Depop and the items turned out to be fake I had to go through the faff of raising a case with PayPal, escalating it, paying money to send the item back etc and the person deleted their Depop account :roll_eyes: took three weeks for me to get a refund, and the agent basically made it out like it was my fault for sending it back without it tracked (which is like ÂŁ6.80 or something, I opted to have it signed for).

I prefer Mecari’s way of dealing with it, I can withdraw payment straight to my bank account (even though it takes a few days to do it) and everything is resolved with them instead of a third party. They have really aggressive moderation and don’t let you type words like “email”, iMessage etc. which I found out when trying to send my purchase receipt, and pictures must be your own. No fees too so I can skip the 13% charge :ok_hand:t3:

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With Monzo having instant notifications and passing on the Mastercard exchange rate, my needs to use PayPal are limited to retailers that I either don’t trust to store my details safely or places where PayPal is the only option (or if I want to order a takeaway and don’t have my physical card with me). I’ve migrated most of my pre-approved payments on PayPal (their equivalent of direct debits) to just use my card.

PayPal pro tip: If you’ve got your bank account added to PayPal, don’t use it to pay for non-GBP transactions as you don’t get the option to choose the origin currency. Only with your card can you choose between PayPal’s “massaged” exchange rates (which you don’t want) and let the card issuer (Monzo->Mastercard) do it (which is what you want).

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