PayPal Debacle: 15 lessons learnt

There is a lot of hatred and criticism about PayPal and its practices. And after what happened to the Indian customers we realized that we learnt these lessons the hard way.

1. No Protection from Arbitrary PayPal decisions: Their decision is final and cannot be appealed.
2. No prior intimation: PayPal didn’t intimate India based users about the recent change in their policies did they?
3. No adherence to regulations: The PayPal payment service is regarded as a stored value facility under Singapore law. The Holder of the PayPal stored value facility, does not require the approval of the Monetary Authority of Singapore.
4. Customer Service: “Effective customer service requires significant personnel expense, and this expense, if not managed properly, could impact our profitability significantly.” Thus their emails are like replies from automated bots.
5. Premium fees for brand recognition: PayPal does charge higher fees due to its brand and recognition which though doesn’t amount to much.
6. Breach of trust: More often than not you’ll face more injustice from PayPal than damage from fraudulent activities. Through our years of experience with PayPal there were no monetary damages from fraudulent activity and maximum from PayPal’s activities.
7. Always have alternatives: Keeping all your eggs in one basket is not the way of the wise.
8. Never leave spare balance: You never know when PayPal may freeze your account. As you understand they easily get away with arbitrary decisions. So keep withdrawing periodically.
9. Favoring the buyer: PayPal’s attitude is more oriented towards buyer protection than sellers. Buyer complaints are settled without interacting with the seller.
10. Money reversal at will: PayPal TOS state they can choose to reverse transactions at will.
11. No real merchant account: Real merchants have real merchant accounts and do not direct their customers to PayPal.
12. Get refund and the goods as well: A compliant by buyer about not receiving the goods easily ends in them getting the refunds and getting to keep the goods as well.
13. You Waive Your Credit Card Consumer Protection Rights: As soon as you accept their terms and conditions.
14. PayPal is the investigator, judge, jury and executioner.
15. Avoid PayPal: This is what we learnt with the above 14 points.

What is one thing that you’d add to this list? Also see Wikipedia PayPal Criticism, Facts you didn’t know about PayPal, Freelancers beware of PayPal and PayPal Evil.