Ok, so I want to sign up to buy things on Ebay, and I see the PayPal option of payment. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I Googled it and there seem to be a lot of anti-PayPal sites out there, but there are always lots of anti-whatever sites. Any dopers with user experiance?
I’ve been pretty happy with it. Mind you, I’m a very casual user. I buy an average of 1-3 items a year through e-bay, and all of those items have been paid with Paypal.
I find that it’s handy because so many internet places accept Paypal, so I haven’t had to sign up anywhere else. I pay for my livejournal account with it as well.
I’ve used PayPal as both a buyer and a seller over the last year or so. I’ve had no complaints with the auction services they provide.
Zev Steinhardt
I love it for my eBay purchases (mainly out of print or old books for my kids with their names in the titles).
The only gripe I have is that some sellers seem to accumulate too many PayPal credits and will no longer accept the payment if it being drawn from a credit card. A debit account seems okay to them, but not a credit (?!?!?!?)
I’m a little confused by that situation, but all in all it is so much more convenient and gets the goods to you days quicker than sending a check or M/O out to the seller.
Check the dates on the anti-PayPal sites. They used to get a lot more grief than they do now, and they’ve changed some policies.
I love PayPal; never had a single problem with them. I have nothing but praise for them.
I’ve personally had several (under 50) transactions with no problems. However, a friend of mine was shafted out of $500 when a deadbeat eBay bidder didnt have the funds in his account to draw from, my friend sent the product to the deadbeat, Paypal couldnt collect from the deadbeat, so they retracted the 500 from my friend. Now he's out the and the product. Paypal customer service was less than available to handle this problem.
Personally, I keep my account a couple hundred bucks or so, and then request a check. SO far so good.
Knk
I’ve had pretty good luck with PayPal and they were even instrumental in getting me a refund when a seller didn’t deliver.
If the customer pays by an eCheck (which is what it sounds like if the customer didn’t have the funds handy), then Paypal tells the seller not to ship until the funds have cleared. It sounds like that’s what your friend did.
Zev Steinhardt
Zev,
Actually, the buyer had an account linked to Paypal. He was a verified (FWIW) user. His linked account had insufficient funds for the transaction, however Paypal already sent the email to my friend saying that he’d been paid. He promptly requested the funds be transferred to HIS linked account and shipped the product. Next day Paypal devulged the screw up to my friend.
It’s a super high volume outfit so some mistakes are going to happen. I still use them, albeit very cautiously.
KnK
“Paypal been berry good to me”. However, there are some few dudes who really hate & despise it. Note, that in general, the “industry leader” always attracts such.
There are a lot of horror stories out there (like KnK’s friend) but I have never had a problem with them. My advice is to never used a linked bank account though; all my paypal transactions go through credit card. If you want to receive money, have them send you a check instead of direct deposit.
As a seller, we were at one point received nothing but complaints about PayPal. We accounted for a few hundred dollars of lost sales as a result due to frustrated first-time users (and then we had to deal with complaints that PayPal kept spamming them). But that was two years ago.
PayPal has since undergone several major overhauls (and I think mergers and acquisitions). Apparently the screw ups happen far less fequently, (though when they screw up, they screw up kinda big.) So most of the negative press will be from 2000-2001.
I can’t vouch for how they may be now because my prior experience was excessively negative and I still avoid them. Nonetheless, in all fairness, it does appear that they have managed to iron out a lot of the administrative snags that used to plague them.
I’ve not had any bad experiences with PayPal, but I don’t accept it on the majority of my items (which are small-value buy-it-now listings) - there is an alternative in the UK called FastPay (run by NatWest) which is mostly free - I think there’s a 20p charge to send money, but that’s about what you’d pay for the stamp when you post a cheque.
I haven’t had a single problem with paypal, but I have only used it maybe half a dozen times.
Didn’t Ebay buy Paypal? I have used them several times without problem.
I have a Paypal account, and I use it mostly to accept payment for a software product I sell. I haven’t had any problems, except…
Last year, I got an e-mail message about something having to do with my Paypal account, telling me to log into their site and look something up. So I clicked the e-mail link to log in, entered my password, then continued. Suddenly I realized that I wasn’t being careful like I normally am with passwords, and it turned out that the link I clicked was not to the actual Palpal site, but another that looked just like it, and had a domain name something like http://www.paypal.com98798q234987-98awkljw34nfpo8haw@joeblow.com/pplogin.html. I immediately went to the real Paypal site and changed my password to something else. This is how nogoodniks steal people’s passwords. I had a temporary lapse in judgment that could have been really bad. So go ahead and get a Paypal account - they’re great - just be careful and never click a link to log into Paypal, always type the URL in yourself, or use one of your own bookmarks.
Wouldn’t it have to be something like http://update.paypal.com/44575425454435465435sdasdd4.html ?
I’d think any domain that was actually ‘http://www.paypal.com/update/lswkhwoi/…’ wopuld be on the paypal domain where my first example would be a sundomain (paypal) on a master domain (update.com).
I use paypal for ebay and also to pay some of my bills electronically. No complaints here, except that it used to be a bitch to sign up for.
Search IMHO there are other topics on Paypal, I don’t have anything new to add from those.
Watch out for fees, they can really add up.