Forum Moderators: buckworks
I'm getting ready to sell a larger quantity of more valuable items over the next couple of months because I need money, and my paypal activity will increase quite a bit. My sale averages will be alot higher then anything I've done in the past as well. I have some fears about paypal from reading anti-paypal websites. When I sell my items, I will need the money quickly, but I'm reading more and more about paypal locking accounts and generally being in favor to fraudulent charge backs. When I read these anti-paypal sites, I always take them with a grain of salt though, since they are so one-sided.
Can anyone ring in on current paypal practices? Any ebayers out there that are successful with alternate online payment methods?
It seems like buyers won't buy without paypal, but they have no clue how bad paypal may be, since paypal favores buyers over sellers.
How do the power sellers continue a good business over many years using paypal? If I had 4+ digit somes of money locked out for 6 months or more, I would devestated. I've even heard of paypal reversing transfers that have taking place weeks to months earlier. But I've also heard that letters to the BB and Attorney Generals reverse these negative actions rather quickly.
Just looking for current experience/opinion. It's terrible that ebay only really alows paypal now for auctions.
Got it all worked out so we thought did another payment I am talking with an AM card through paypal and got shut down again...We can't figure it out so that was it we quit them.
O yea they charged the card then shut the account off Now go figure that
Hmmm say 100 people got this done to them they have 1,000,000.00 to draw intrest off of for howerver long the care to up to 8 months....
Nice racket I say
We got our account locked 5 years ago for no good reason...joined in the class action lawsuit to settle the matter.
Never trust paypal.
One giant warning I will tell you about Paypal that's not publicized is that if you receive payment from another user who received fraudulent, Paypal will take the money out of your account if they can not collect from the original recipient of those funds.
For example, buyer A pays seller B. seller B buys some supplies from seller C. buyer A payment was unauthorized. seller B has withdrawn all his money from his Paypal account. Paypal goes to seller C to collect.
Not a big issue when you deal in volume on relatively low dollar items, but imagine if you have $50,000 charge taken out of your Paypal account even though you are several iterations removed from the fraudulent transaction.
For example early yesterday I contacted them with a problem and they got back to me tonight, two business days later, to say that I had contacted the wrong email address. They left me instructions on who I should have contacted but why did they not just forward the email to the appropriate people? This happens all the time even though I spent ten minutes on their site trying to find out who could help with my (their!) problem.
Their support organisation leaves a lot to be desired. They appear to put all sorts of obstacles in the way of people seeking support. But then I have only been with them for about four years. ;)
Do they still have a rep in here?
Had I gotten any feedback at all from my clients (they use paypal for ebay and other stuff as well) that they weren't to happy with paypal I would have advised them of an alternate quick as a wink..
How could these people be any less customer centric? I mean if someone sends you an email in your organisation and it arrives at the wrong desk is it really asking to much for the recipient to expedite it by forwarding it to the right person? Don't they all work for the same company?
Incidentally a few weeks ago I sent them an email asking why Paypal Payments Pro costs £20 per month in the UK and only $20 (effectively half) in the US. I am still waiting on a reply.
Do they still have a rep in here?
Oh, I still skulk around here occasionally. ;-)
I can't help you with any specific questions about your account, but if you've got a general question, feel free to send me a sticky mail and I'll see if I can find an answer.
Incidentally a few weeks ago I sent them an email asking why Paypal Payments Pro costs £20 per month in the UK and only $20 (effectively half) in the US. I am still waiting on a reply.
While I don't have insight into the specific decision-making process for the Pro pricing, I actually would NOT think that this was a simplistic decision to "charge the same amount" by just switching the currency symbol, nor do I think there's any attempt to gouge our UK customers. We have dedicated local teams in several of our supported countries (particularly those that have their own tailored version of the PayPal website) who decide what services are most important to offer and how they will be priced. As an example, the transaction fees vary somewhat between the UK and US Business accounts, and I wouldn't be surprised if the different Pro monthly pricing is driven by similar reasons.
You mean like double?
You mean like double?
No - But I found it interesting that the transaction fees range from a slightly higher percentage at the introductory level (3.4% compared to 2.9%), to a slightly lower percentage for the highest volume merchants (1.4% compared to 1.9%). I don't know what factors impact this, and I'm not saying the exact same factors caused the amount of difference we have in the Pro pricing. However, this does help illustrate that PayPal adjusts its pricing according to the local market, and I take that as an indicator that the £20 price was based on local dynamics with which I'm not familiar. I can't tell you exactly how we came to the £20 monthly price, but I can guess that we probably would not be offering Pro at all in the UK if we couldn't charge that amount.
EDIT:
I suspect I'm still not giving you the answer you'd like. Unfortunately I'm merely able to explain "why prices may differ between the US and UK" and cannot tell you any more specifically "why Pro has a significantly different price in the UK compared to the US price".
If the monthly price is too much for you, I'm sorry that you are unable to use Pro for your business - and I hope one of our other solutions will still work for you. If, however, you are concerned that we are unaware of conversion rates or insensitive to non-US markets, I don't believe that either is the case. Our local UK team determines how we will provide our solutions to our UK merchants at a cost that works for both PayPal and our merchants.
Incidentally a few weeks ago I sent them an email asking why Paypal Payments Pro costs £20 per month in the UK and only $20 (effectively half) in the US. I am still waiting on a reply.
This appears to be an ongoing issue. I would guess that the cost of doing business is a bit more in the UK than it is in the US. Also, how does it compare to other services in the UK? Is it inline with their rates? If so, what's the beef? ;)
I would guess that the cost of doing business is a bit more in the UK than it is in the US.
Higher embedded taxes maybe? The kind that the end consumer never sees...except in the form of higher prices...and guess who takes the blame? The seller.
cost of processing credit cards is. Where as in the states it is almost exclusively done through the percentage paid by the merchant.
It's just that foreign companies seem to see us here in the UK as an easy target and our goverment allows them to.
Can anyone explain what we get for our £20?
