Paypal —AAARRRRGGGGH!
cancelled my accounts, in anger & frustration, over my very first (hopeless snarled) attempt to sell on ebay.
Are there good alternatives?
For what purpose are you looking for a PayPal alternative?
Payment methods for eBay:
PayPal
ProPay
Skrill
Merchant credit card
Payment upon pickup
So Propay and Skrill will work
If you’re selling on eBay, not accepting PayPal will drastically cut your sales – to the point where it’s probably not worth it. Either work it out with PayPal or try another marketplace altogether. For consumer goods, Amazon Marketplace is very very good (and MUCH easier than eBay), but there’s no bidding – you just set a price and condition and someone buys it.
Otherwise, eBay + PayPal are the accepted monopoly in the US, and using anything else just makes you look like a scammer.
However, I have seen sellers place an explanatory paragraph at the end of their auction page (at least I have seen this on Spanish ebay) saying that due to excessive paypal charges (true) they will only be accepting bank transfers… or any other form of payment. This however could only occur with a seller with an excellent reputation based upon many sales.
I’ve never sold on eBay, but I’ve bought a few things. I’ve had a PayPal account since they started and have never had a problem. What is it about PayPal that attracts the hate?
As a seller it’s a double payout. First you pay ebay fees for the sale, and then you pay paypal fees to receive payment. Also if you send money through paypal in a different currency, not only do they take a percentage by giving you a poor exchange rate, they also charge you a percentage of the amount transferred.
My opinion is that Paypal sucks, but sometimes you just are obliged to use it, like for ebay payments… in both directions, as buyer and/or seller.
However, there do exist other cheaper methods of transferring money on-line.
I have a love/hate relationship with PayPal also as a nonprofit who doesn’t use eBay but just uses PayPal to accept donations. I won’t get into all of my issues with them, because there are many. But here’s a possible alternative. If you have a website, you can do your own online store pretty easily using SquareUp. SquareUp is a payment processor that allows you to accept all the major credit cards, they send you a little card swipe gadget you can stick on a smart phone or iPad that works with their app. Their app is basically a little point of sale device. It’s very cool and I love them. But more to the point, they also allow you to have your store online for web sales. They currently only allow sales in the U.S. but hopefully they’ll add Canada soon.
I used to sell a lot of antique and cool junk technology items on Ebay but in the last few years I’ve REALLY limited the type of items I’ll sell. The problem is that too many Ebay buyers are not responsilble customers and act like buying an item from an individual should be just like Walmart. Paypal is not a bank 
and can pretty much do what they want with your account after ANY compliant from a buyer, Including locking you out of your account and funds availability. There are numerous ways to scam sellers, tacitly allowed by Ebay and Paypal.
I never want to do business with ebay OR Paypal again!
4 1/2 hours, and I still can’t get the paypal account to link with ebay!
Total tech disaster & all their fault.
And help?
HA!
Good luck!
Now that the OP got several reasonable answers, I can fill you in on my experiences that explains why I hate Paypal. As mentioned, I don’t even use eBay, so these are only experiences using Paypal as a general payment processor. Like many non-profits, we got a Paypal account so that people can donate money to us that way.
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As someone else mentioned, they do not operate with standard banking procedures or policies. As an example, instead of assigning a unique account number, your account is identified by your email address. I have seen people send money to incorrect (misspelled) email addresses, or wrong addresses (to mine instead of to the one our organization set up for accepting donations). In that second scenario I was able to retrieve the money by attaching my email address to the paypal account. In the former situation, I have no idea how the sender retrieved the money. I suspect that Paypal has a nice little collection of money from people who accidentally tried to pay to wrong email addresses and never figured it out.
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Following from #1, since they allow you to attach more than one email address to an account, this can be abused to your own demise. For example, an organization I used to be treasurer for had an account, and (before I came on board) allowed a completely different organization to “borrow” the use of their Paypal account. The account had our email address and also the email of this other organization. It took me several years to pound it into their thick heads (my org, not Paypal who couldn’t care less) that we were mixing our monies together by doing that. I finally broke through by explaining that the Paypal account was like a big donation jar, with two slots - people might put money into our slot or theirs, but it’s all going into the same jar and mixing.
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Over two years of experimenting, I’ve only found ONE reliable way for people to donate to us without Paypal taking a cut: connect paypal to your bank account.
People who don’t keep up with Paypal policies (like our president) often advise to choose “send money” and then choose “friends and family”. It’s not as easy as that. After doing those two steps, Paypal then asks you to chose whether you want to pay their fee or if you want the fee taken out of the total sent to the recipient. Lots of our donors select to have the fee taken out of their donation, and that’s their prerogative. I just kind of wish Paypal at least offered a discounted fee for donations to nonprofits. They profit off us way, way too much!
- Following #3, once connected to your bank account, Paypal is known to do nasty things. Recently we sent a payment to someone who did work for us, and had to ask her to refund it so we could pay her differently. Her Paypal balance was slightly short (likely due to the fees), but instead of pulling only the difference from her bank account in order to do the refund, Paypal sucked the entire $900 and change out of her bank!
Tried to add this to #2 but missed the edit window:
They also allow you to attach any, and as many as you want, bank accounts to the Paypal account. So our paypal account was tied to both our bank and the other organization’s. At any time I could have moved all the funds into our account, and the other organization could have done the same.
Back in the bad old days of the Internet, linking your checking account to a PayPal account often resulted in everything being emptied out of it.