my experience with paypal has also been largely positive. I process between USD$10K and USD$20K a month in paypal payments.
As far as I can tell, they aren't much worse than most other payment processors. Most payment processors, if someone with bad credit comes along, or someone gets lots of chargebacks, or if someone is in a funny business sector, they keep some percentage of your money in escrow for a certain number of months.
Now, personally, I have a very liberal refund policy (and really, I think anyone who accepts paypal or credit cards should do the same... because anyone who wants to, with either of those methods, can get their money back, if they really want to.) so I generally don't get chargebacks on my papal account. My last 'dispute' in fact, was an accident... the guy says he meant to dispute the next transaction, with a different company.
and hell, if you tangle with the IRS, your regular bank account will get frozen.
Now, I have heard many, many paypal horror stories from non-profits.
I wonder if paypal is going overboard in cooperating with the US government (in this case, the government harassing not-for-profits who haven't lawyered up enough) to avoid the fate of e-gold?
The e-gold guys, as far as I can tell, were told 'freeze your business or we will throw your asses in jail.' I've still got around a hundred bucks in e-gold I can't access because of that.
E-gold was set up a the way a privacy nerd would set up a banking system, and they built a fairly secure system, but they ignored fraud, saying they were trying to be 'like cash' and first accumulated a reputation for serving the shady and outright fraudulent market, before being shut down by the government.
As far as I can tell, they aren't much worse than most other payment processors. Most payment processors, if someone with bad credit comes along, or someone gets lots of chargebacks, or if someone is in a funny business sector, they keep some percentage of your money in escrow for a certain number of months.
Now, personally, I have a very liberal refund policy (and really, I think anyone who accepts paypal or credit cards should do the same... because anyone who wants to, with either of those methods, can get their money back, if they really want to.) so I generally don't get chargebacks on my papal account. My last 'dispute' in fact, was an accident... the guy says he meant to dispute the next transaction, with a different company.
and hell, if you tangle with the IRS, your regular bank account will get frozen.
Now, I have heard many, many paypal horror stories from non-profits.
I wonder if paypal is going overboard in cooperating with the US government (in this case, the government harassing not-for-profits who haven't lawyered up enough) to avoid the fate of e-gold?
The e-gold guys, as far as I can tell, were told 'freeze your business or we will throw your asses in jail.' I've still got around a hundred bucks in e-gold I can't access because of that.
E-gold was set up a the way a privacy nerd would set up a banking system, and they built a fairly secure system, but they ignored fraud, saying they were trying to be 'like cash' and first accumulated a reputation for serving the shady and outright fraudulent market, before being shut down by the government.