PayPal or ?

[Nelson Longflap]

I know lots of people who use PayPal with no problems (mostly for purchasing). But, but ... a student I used to teach had such a bad time with PP (in no way his fault) I've always felt deterred. It took months of hassle and unbelievable persistence on his part to eventually get PP to correct the problem.  (Google "paypal horror stories" if you want to be deterred too.)

PayPal isn't the only online payments system, but you'd hardly know it. It doesn't help that PP is owned by eBay of course, but why do so many others behave as if there's no alternative? So two questions:

(1) Am I being excessively paranoid about PayPal?
(2) What's the experience of alternatives like http://www.nochex.com/ that appears to be a UK based equivalent of PP? Or http://www.worldpay.com/ which has its roots in the UK, although appears to be more geared to small/medium retailers.

My usage would be mostly purchasing, and (rarely) selling stuff. 

Your views will be interesting and probably enlightening too, so many thanks in advance.

[Euan Uzami]

no, paypal are overly evil cahunts of the highest order

[mrcharly-YHT]

I have used paypal to make UK payments, transfer money, even transfer money overseas.

I've never ever had a problem.

The issues people report are nearly always when they believe they should be refunded and the other party doesn't want to refund.  I don't believe there is anything in paypal's terms and conditions, or any general legal ruling that indicates how Paypal should behave in this situation.

[Little Jim]

The main thing to bear in mind when paying by PayPal is that the protection you get from a credit card transaction for purchases over £100 does not apply with PayPal.

[Euan Uzami]

I have used paypal to make UK payments, transfer money, even transfer money overseas.

I've never ever had a problem.

The issues people report are nearly always when they believe they should be refunded and the other party doesn't want to refund.  I don't believe there is anything in paypal's terms and conditions, or any general legal ruling that indicates how Paypal should behave in this situation.

...or when paypal hasn't been sufficiently diligent in preventing fraud against itself, and loses money as a result, but doesn't want to take the financial hit so tries to pass it on.

I don't know whether there is a general legal ruling as to whether paypal is liable for losses that arise as a result of misuse/abuse of merchant services completely under its own control and not under any control of the seller (me), but in my case it decided it didn't want to fork out the legal fees to find out so I guess we'll never know.

I take your point however that in most cases it is forced to act as arbitrator and however it decides someone is going to feel aggrieved.

[mrcharly-YHT]

Ben is your beef actually with Ebay and not Paypal?


I  know ebay owns paypal, but one is not the other. It's perfectly possible to use Paypal and have nothing to do with ebay.

[Biggsy]

I know lots of people who use PayPal with no problems (mostly for purchasing).

MILLIONS of people use PayPal several times a week with no problems.

[Euan Uzami]

Ben is your beef actually with Ebay and not Paypal?


I  know ebay owns paypal, but one is not the other. It's perfectly possible to use Paypal and have nothing to do with ebay.

I've got no 'beef' with either. I did have a problem with them in the past, they didn't want to pay me, I forced them to do so. All happily resolved.
I continue to use both ebay and paypal with no problems.
But that doesn't mean I like their ethics (or lack of them). People debate whether they act primarily in the best interests of the buyer or seller - but in reality neither is the case - they act primarily in their OWN best interests, and the buyer and seller are either second and third, or third and second, respectively.

[robgul]

Have to say I've had no problems with Paypal - using it to buy (too much) stuff, to sell (not enough) stuff and also as the payment vehicle for the bit of e-commerce my E2E site does.

You mention NoChex and Worldpay - they're not the same things as Paypal in that they are services that shops (or "merchants") use - we have a Worldpay merchant account for all our MacRide Events entries to take debit and credit cards ... and they process transactions where people can pay us with Paypal.    There are others - Sage springs to mind (the accounting software people, creaming more from their customers - and of course Google has a payments system.

As suggested pretty much every Paypal dispute you hear about is based on claims for refunds or faulty goods - that's not Paypal's fault - they just provide the mechanism.

Rob

[numbnuts]

I use paypal all the time, as they say so far so good 

[crowriver]

I've been using PayPal for 13 years for sending and receiving payments, no problems so far. I had a Nochex account in the early zeroes but didn't use it much. Had a PayPal merchant account for 3 years to process credit card payments, a few niggles with that but it basically worked okay. Was cheaper than WorldPay, etc. too.

[Valiant]

I use Paypal for most things but might be switching over to WorldPay or SagePay shortly

[Tim Hall]

Where's the catch in paying someone by bank transfer (assuming payment is within the UK)?

[Feanor]

Where's the catch in paying someone by bank transfer (assuming payment is within the UK)?

Irreversable, no greivance procedure, I think.

Much like PayPal

[L CC]

Where's the catch in paying someone by bank transfer (assuming payment is within the UK)?

You have to find the annoying calculator thingy to add people to your bank online. It's a lot easier to get **-**-** ######## wrong than billynomates@seller.no

I've never had a problem with paypal, apart from them refusing to let me change the name on my account and forcing me to make a new one.

[thing1]

I know lots of people who use PayPal with no problems (mostly for purchasing).

MILLIONS of people use PayPal several times a week with no problems.

BILLIONS of people use a car several times a week with no problems. 

 
Used paypal for hmm 7 years(?) now. Generally fine, but a couple times they decided to put a transaction on hold for "investigation" and it's a pretty frustrating process. Once they were sending emails to me and the seller with blatantly contradictory info suggestion it was the other party's fault and held up waiting on each other to provide more info. Very irritating and could have led to a lot of unneeded distrust.

But now I'm living in USA I understand a bit more where it's come from: the banking system is so backwards here, that pretty much any service paypal offers is more convenient than you'd get from a high street bank 

[Nelson Longflap]

Thanks all, and especially robgul for the clarification.  Tbh I think I am a bit paranoid as most get on with PP without problems (as reflected in the small sample here).  My ex-student's experience wasn't a buyer / seller dispute; it was PP itself behaving very badly.  I'm happy to tell you the details over a beverage, but not to put the hearsay story in writing here.

I also had a weird experience when selling a highish value item using gumtree when an offshore based purchaser wanted to buy unseen, but was only willing to pay through PP.  Seeing the probability of a purchaser dispute coming I told him to get lost.

I appreciate the convenience of PP and will probably succumb to it.  Although just because I'm paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me