They haven't done anything innovative since they were acquired by eBay. Well, unless you consider freezing accounts and confiscating funds an innovative activity.
* 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.
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
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? 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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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.
Is there a lower resistance alternative for a general consumer transferring money to a friend over the web/mobile phone? I default to using PayPal since the chances of my friend having a Paypal account is higher than the newer services.
I've been experimenting with Dwolla lately. They charge $0.25 per transaction over $10 (and nothing for under $10). The downside is they skip credit cards and go straight for your bank account so you a) need to hook up your bank account to them (which I did for PayPal anyway), and b) unless you have money hanging out in your Dwolla account, paying someone takes 3 days for the bank transfer to clear (which, again, is going to happen with PayPal anyway if you use a bank and don't run a balance, like me).
My only real problem with Dwolla is their iOS app sucks, and their website isn't a whole lot better. But I've had no problems with their actual service, although I've only transferred a few hundred dollars so far.
sending money P2P with the paypal app is fairly friction-less. Either way - this is great news for an industry (Fin-Tech) that needs more alternatives and more transparency
card.io is pretty cool—I wasn't aware of it until now.
I’m just shocked at how poor the security of the entire consumer finance system is, if you can accept payment just by taking a photo of someone’s card. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional credit card fraudsters had implemented this technology years ago (except with covert cameras).
A sincere question: what would stop you from photocopying someone’s card and using it to buy goods with this system? At least with Square you need a magnetic barcode, which might act as a very mild deterrent.
EDIT: FYI, I live in Europe, where we’ve had Chip & PIN-verified PoS transactions for a while now. Still not the best security, but at least it’s no longer trivial.
AFAIK, cards processed with card.io are processed as if they were "card not present" transactions, which have a different risk profile (and thereby different fee structure) than "card present" transactions (that requires some information that is on the magnetic strip that you can't just read off the card itself).
At least in Australia, all you need to make a purchase with a credit card is the numbers and dates on the front, and the 3 digit security code on the back. Having a program extract these values automatically wouldn't make this any less secure.
Card.io essentially just types in the information on the front of the card for you (card number, cardholder name, expiration date). For most applications, you probably still need to type in the billing zip code and CVV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_security_code) found on the back of the card.
The actual scan technology is very specific and hard if not impossible (with current tech) to implement on things like a photocopied card. A real card needs to be used.
>Smart move... now they just need to buy up SQUARE
No, no no no no, no, HELL no. Square is one of Paypal's only real competitors. And a real competitor is what Paypal needs to fix their horrid UI and customer service.
I would be more hopeful that they would buy up zendesk or some sort of actually useful support competency. I really think the amazingly poor phone support on things when they go squishy from Paypal is holding it back big time.
All my experiences with PayPal's phone support have been fantastic, from handling ridiculous disputes from crazy customers, to getting information about services, to updating tax info for the 1099-K stuff. Given we only see maybe a dozen major 'PayPal fail' stories a year with 200+ million accounts, their record seems pretty good. Even the famous PayPalSucks forum attracts a handful of threads a month.
IOW, I think they're better than most people give them credit for, and above average among all the big corps whose support I've had to use.
>All my experiences with PayPal's phone support have been fantastic
Give me the elite support phone number you've been using. Every time I've called, I get:
* Someone who speaks broken english
* Who can't actually do anything with any of my problems
* And can 9 times out of 10 not pull up my account. Their backend is apparently made out of spit and duct tape.
Seriously. I got a Paypal nastygram saying my account was going to be limited (despite not having any activity for OVER A YEAR), which was then mysteriously lifted 6 months later, again for no real reason, and CS was utterly useless in explaining WTF.
<mode="rant" intensity="120%">
Fuck these opaque, non-overrideable "risk algorithms". The least you bastards could do is explain to me why you limited my account. And don't tell me I'm a 'risk' either, assholes. I've had an account with you in good standing for over 10 years, stop treating me like i'm some random you've never dealt with, put your fingers on the keyboard, and remove these idiotic limits. Pricks.
Never understood this complaint. I think you meant the second point rather than the first one really - you get the wrong broken-English speaking people. For some time I was the person who could actually do something about problems, but the support team was staffed by 100% British people. And believe me, my spoken English was very broken.
Because when you have an issue, moreso an urgent one, the last thing you want to be doing is repeating yourself and asking the other guy to repeat themselves many times. Misunderstandings at that level could at the very least lose you access to your account.
There's a reason I've taken to using TTY service to deal with companies where ever possible, it completely eliminates that ambiguity.
a) You seem to use the word 'complexity' like it's a good thing. Maybe you meant 'sophistication'?
b) That sounds like a poor metric for sophistication. I remember someone mentioning (maybe patio11) that company.com/blog was better from a SEO perspective than a separate subdomain. Maybe they're showing more sophistication than you think?
>to get the opportunity to work on projects that will accelerate innovation at a scale that’s just not possible at a startup.
Since when have PayPal done anything innovative in the last few years. (I am genuinely interested in answers to this)