PayPal is not evil.<p>I can't think of a company that has done more to democratize banking than PayPal.<p>Setting up a Merchant Account can be a real pain (and I too hope PayPal improves in this regard), but I really hope the author thinks harder about the title next time before making such a generalization.<p>If you want to know why PayPal is not evil, try this experiment:<p>Go to your bank and try to open a checking account with a debit card with <i>no minimum balance</i>, a positive interest rate, ability to transfer money instantly without writing a check (basically a wire transfer) for free, <i>no insufficient fund charges</i>, no monthly fees, free online and mobile banking, etc.<p>PayPal offers this to everyone, regardless of how rich or poor you are. If you don't have a lot of money other banks such as WellsFargo, Bank of America, etc., could care less about you and will try and take as much as they can from you in the form of ATM charges, monthly fees, overdraft charges, etc. Of course, I may be making my own over generalization here, but suffice it to say that I don't think PayPal is evil.
I'm on the side of PayPal is evil.<p>I'm tempted to ask everyone who has been affected by PayPal's "security measures" (a frozen account) to write a post and submit it to a blog. -But I don't want to waste anyone's time. Anyways. Aye. I have been affected.
The problem with these stories is that the millions of PayPal users who have never had a problem aren't heard from, so there is no sense of perspective or balance.<p>That said, I have a low trust tolerance of payment processors, so I (1) have alternate payment methods setup and available, and (2) transfer cash out frequently.
The evil part of paypal is that they don't learn from their mistakes very quickly and they seem to not realize they are affecting peoples MONEY. Kinda silly but true. It's business as usual over there regardless of $1 or $100,000 they just tied up of your cash.<p>I went through the same scenario in 2003 with paypal with tens of thousands of dollars locked up pending a review... Thankfully we had a back up plan (credit card processing)<p>The plus side of paypal... when you and if you can process some serious loot through them you get treated like a rock star and you get access people and help you wouldn't otherwise get.
That scares the shit out of me. I am planning to start offering a paid option on my startup and using Paypal (so far it was free to everyone)...<p>Is there a simple solution (at least as a backup) to paypal? I am not in the US, so most of the recommended solutions I see only work for US companies.
In the most recent PayPal horror stories I've read the common denom has been digital goods. PayPal doesn't seem to know what to do when there's no physical product being shipped, and no tracking number. Do similar problems happen with physical items?
Perhaps there is a <i>reason</i> for the interesting Google "suggestions" when you start your search with "paypal is"<p>[ following the strategy on boy-/girlfriends at <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043476" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1043476</a> ]<p>Although there are customer service horror stories about Google itself, the stories about PP seem to keep on coming (as, apparently, do their policies/procedures).<p>I make a practice to process only that $ amount through PP that I am comfortable losing.
With all the horror stories around I'd say they're simply not a professional choice as a Merchant Account. Simple as that. They do a lot of other stuff very well.
What's evil is offering Twitter software that lets people auto-follow followers and auto-tweet rss feeds. The former helps perpetuate all the follower spam out there and the latter fills Twitter with yet more redundant content.