About 3 or 4 years ago PayPal added the option to buy cryptocurrency, which I thought I’d try. (Dumb idea 🙄)
Part of the sign up process was glitched. I retried and clicked submit one too many times, I guess. Now I’ve been unable to use PayPal for years. They blocked me because THEIR SITE was broken, but the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.
This was just for me to pay others. I can only imagine how awful PayPal is if you are a vendor.
Fuck PayPal.
What is the use case for PayPal in the US? Here in Brazil we pay everything with credit card or bank transfer with a QR code. People can transfer money to you from any bank 24/7 instantaneously with just your email or phone number without any fees. Is that different in the US?
The banking system in the US is a legacy mess. Transfers still take business days to go through and making your bank account # and routing information available is actually a security concern, honestly I don’t even know why that’s still a thing.
Products like PayPal and Plaid try to provide something that is slightly more usable, but with this underlying obsolescence their functionality is very limited.
When paying for services, credit cards are still the way to do it. For P2P payments, people use PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and others. Nothing even close to a unified system like Pix in Brazil.
There is Zelle, which is instant bank to bank. It’s fairly widely available from one’s financial institution, and it doesn’t cost anything, but it’s not terribly well known yet for some reason
It is until you end up having to blacklist zelle because your banking information was used to defraud someone. I actually had my account broken into, funds deposited from zelle and then all available funds removed from my account in the space of about an hour. Went to pay for something the day after and had to call my bank’s fraud department. They tried the same thing with a second account of mine but it was flagged immediately when they tried to use the same login credentials (they weren’t remotely the same). So no zelle for me. It’s permanently disabled by both my banks for security reasons.
Zelle works pretty good, the main problem is the security limits.
Let’s say you hire somebody to build a shed for $5,000.
You can’t just pay him $5,000. The first day maybe you can pay him $1,000, then the next day you can pay him another $1,500, then you’ve reached the 30-day maximum for a new contact so you have to wait till day 31 to pay him the other $2,500. After that if you want another shed you can pay the $5,000 instantly.
I had a landlord make me pay them in zelle. Bank limits meant I had to pay them over 3 days every month. What a mess
They named it after gazelle, which is a herd prey animal. That causes it to slip away from attention when it’s mentioned.
If they’d called in Bonko or something it would stand out in people’s memories more. Bonko, bright orange icon, it would spread by wildfire. Nobody would forget that name.
There are no hard consonants in the word. Synaesthetically, it’s a blue-purple word. Cool, muted. It’s a word that, even before the “gazelle” reference, is hiding there. Your mind slips over it without friction. It enters and leaves your mouth and your mind like a fish passing under the sparkling water, nearly unnoticed.
Terrible brand name. I mean, it does convey a little more safety than “Bonko” but the whole point with the unsafe sounding name is it causes the person to consciously ask “How safe is it?” and if you can answer that immediately with “Safer than Ft Knox” then it becomes part of the brand consciously.
Zelle is non-threatening, but that’s not the same thing as safe when it comes to business or finances.
What’s a good safe, energetic, competent, orange word for this service? Hmm. Bonus points if it’s intuitively self-descriptive.
How about “Paytag”. It’s yellow but whatever. Still might not be better than Bonko.
I want some of whatever you’re on
Bonko me $20 and I’ll send you some
Trango
Zelle blacklisted me for similar reasons as this guy lol
It’s used for Internet purchases, so you don’t have to give your billing information some random site that might get hacked.
PayPal passes most billing information to the store where you purchased from. Card info is excluded, but in most cases PCI compliance checks ensure that card info is stored securely (or not at all).
Aussie here. One reason I use PayPal is for subscriptions (streaming services etc) to avoid the headache of updating credit card details in multiple places when I change bank, credit card renews, etc. just change it in PayPal once and every subscription keeps working.
Why’d I never think of this?!
Why would any one use bank details that can’t be cancelled for online services? Pay pal is worse. Will hold your money ransom. Being able to cancel payment method is very important, best is unique payment method for each service.
Except that you can …
Cancel auto payments
Edit: I get you. You mean multiple cards within PayPal itself per vendor. Yeah, that seems like similar effort but at least you can see everything in one portal. I have a single card linked with just enough limit to cover subscriptions and the odd internet purchase.
Good luck with that. Its got no guarantee of working and can be ignored and it does.
Paypal is cancerous middleman. You do not need and on those rare occasions where you want to risk the transaction, never link it to your bank account. Use disposable prepaid services.
Agree, where I live for recurring subscriptions most people use “digital credit cards” that you generate on your banking app and they have short expiration dates or you can cancel them and generate a new one anytime you want. That’s good because there are so many services that make it a pain in the ass to cancel a subscription so you just delete the card from existence.
Exactly!
I’m looking squarely at Adobe and other companys who fraudulently represent services, because nothing is a product any more and extorting money by charging rent or stealing IP is the new white collar crime.
In my experience, their consumer protection is great.
PayPal has been absolutely instrumental for me in issuing refunds with obstinate vendors. Once or twice they’ve issued me a refund after being refused a return/refund when an Aliexpress vendor either sent the wrong item or nothing at all.
I even got them to secure me a refund against the Australian government after they refused to issue a refund after directing me to apply for a tourist visa with the wrong visa process.
I love this result. It’s really damn hard to protect yourself from government failure, especially in cases where you are owed money. It’s awesome that you not only got your money back, but also got to play the “fuck you, if you take my lunch money you can fight my big brother” card.
I felt the same way. I was VERY happy with that outcome. I won’t say PayPal earned my LOYALTY with that, because loyalty to ANY company is stupidity, but at the very least they earned my respect for the time being. Of course, I reserve the right to revoke it at any time.
🤣🤣🤣
Here in the US our banks are draconian. We just struggle through it I guess 🤷♂️
It gives businesses a very easy to way to set up monthly payments, one-time donations, accept forms of payments other than e-transfer (which many people don’t want to use), allows for international purchases without being penalized, and more.
Other options are available, but they are neither easy/cheap/convenient for the business or any better for the customer.
I see. From that list the international purchases is a good reason to use PayPal in Brazil. I only have an account there because like 6 years ago I needed to pay for a TOEFL certification and without an international card the only way was PayPal so it worked pretty nicely. Never had to use it after that tho. Hope you guys get a better alternative so PayPal can die a horrible death.
Yes its different. Sending money electronically is a mess of apps and limits and fees.
Brazil is younger