fuck you, paypal

[piranha]

i imagine you all have read the latest dreamwidth announcement.

it's not as if i've liked paypal before, but now i am through with them. the question is, i've mostly used them out of convenience, because they are pretty much everywhere, and i've felt better about leaving my credit card information with one company than to hand it out to every site where i spend an occasional buck.

i am completely clueless as to who else there even is but paypal. help? (yeah, i'll be using the google, but i like to hear of personal experiences.)

Comments

[cuscuta]

Google Checkout worked ok for me, the once. :-)

[juliet]

I've used Google Checkout a couple of times with no problems. (From consumer, not provider, POV, I would add.)

[piranha]

yeah, i am mostly a consumer too at this point. i shall give google checkout a try. though i can't say i am thrilled that google is into everything too, but google is still more trustworthy than paypal.

[firecat]

If you hear of any other payment system, let me know.

[piranha]

i've recently looked into a bunch of e-currency dealers, for reasons of privacy, and man; is that field ever full of scams. which is, i guess, not really a surprise, because of course scammers want privacy when it comes to financial interactions, *snrk*.

at this point, webmoney is the only one who didn't smell immediately to high heaven, though i wouldn't lay my hands into the fire for them either. but i haven't tried them out yet. there's also pecunix.

when it comes to direct competition with paypal, google checkout is probably the best bet at this point.

[firecat]

Thanks! I intend, at least, to use PayPal only as a last resort from now on, instead of as a convenience.

Oops that was me

[treacle_well]

The anonymous comment re google checkout was me. I wasn't logged in.

Also wanted to say thank you for bringing this to my attention. I don't always read the dreamwidth announcements, but this time I went back and did. Ugh. Stupid paypal. I'm glad I hardly ever use it.

Re: Oops that was me

[piranha]

thanks. yeah, i am not pleased how much i got sucked into using paypal.

[erik]

Their ubiquity makes them hard to replace. For instance I will not be able to completely disentangle myself from them anytime in the foreseeable future. Because someone who pays me money on a regular basis uses them exclusively to do so. And a group I wish to continue to support uses them for their automated donate-each-month system.

If Google Checkout continues to grow, it may be possible to convince the latter to switch. But the former, I'm stuck with.

[wild_irises]

I rely on Paypal such that it would be very difficult for me to give them up. I'm writing to them to complain about their treatment of Dreamwidth, however.

I have used Revolution Money Exchange once or twice with reasonable results, but most sites don't take them.

[piranha]

*nod*. yeah, i have my complaint in the typewriter, so to speak.

but now that i've realized how deep they're into everything, i am determined to extract myself for that reason alone. it's bad enough google has its fingers in every pie, but google still tries to adhere to their "don't be evil" motto. paypal and ebay made no such promise, and plenty of crap has come from them already.

we need more than one big online payment processor.

[sara]

Yeah, I'd be interested in hearing what your research turns up -- my nonprofit uses PayPal to take donations online, because we take in such a tiny amount that way each year (a few hundred bucks at most) and they were the only place I could find, when I set it up a few years ago, that would deal with a charitable org. on that scale.

But their recent shenanigans don't particularly incline me to do business with them, if there's an alternate vendor (and this is a case where if I found an alternate vendor, I could switch it out for the time and trouble of re-building the donation page, which...I kind of have to do anyhow, because C. coded it in fricking Dreamweaver, ugh ugh ugh.)

[flarenut]

And this is the kind of marketplace where the existence of alternate vendors is really a good idea. Otherwise you get the cutthroat competition between Visa and Mastercard.

[green_knight]

I've also used <searches memory> Click & Buy, and I remember being *extremely* wary before handing over my details to them (and don't have the genuine address at hand, either). The problem isn't that *you* want to choose, it's that almost anyone else who uses that kind of electronic transfer uses PayPal, so they're kind of hard to avoid.

I wrote to them with a complaint about the affair and was told 'the company needs to contact us directly' which is fair enough - I just hope that enough of DWs customers complain to make enough helpdeskers take it upstairs to their manager for _someone_ to take note that this is a problem - not because of the individual case, but because PayPal is being used to get at one of their customers and becomes, in effect, a tool of blackmail. And *that* is very much not in the interest of PayPal. (If this happens to a company with a furious and not-very-lawabiding customer base, one can see revenge attacks happening to completely uninvolved third parties - at which point, the shit would really hit the fan.)