PayPal is my Nemesis

It's been quite a while since I've written, and it seems like lately I just have a whole lot of stuff to gripe about. So I think that this is going to be Bitch Week so I can let off some steam. But I'll probably backdate an entry about the recent Wallace and Gromit movie sometime this week, so there will be something pleasant for you to read at some point.

PayPal, subsidiary of eBay. PayPal is a money-transfer system; you can send or receive money from all over the place (not quite everywhere, but many places around the globe), and it's send electronically and therefore swiftly. You can even make charges to your credit card to make payments! It's very handy for paying for eBay auctions - something I spend perhaps too much time doing.

PayPal has some flaws, though, especially in its eBay integration. For several years I've had a personal account with PayPal - and really, "Personal" should be capitalized, because it's a specific account type. You can send cash or credit card payments, but you can only receive cash payments, and you also can't receive payments from international buyers (outside your own country - or at least, for me, outside the US). This would be fine, except that the eBay integration doesn't actually provide any support for defining these limitations! So I've been getting people bidding on my auctions - and winning - who want to make credit card payments or who are outside the US, and who then are stymied because they need to go another route for their payment. This is especially annoying for overseas buyers, who basically need to send me a money order, in US dollars, drawn on a US bank (because anything less results in my getting socked with service fees from my bank, and possibly from theirs).

This would be less annoying except that as Internet commerce grows, more and more people seem to not read the bloody instructions in the auctions; they just see "ah, item I want, they take PayPal, all is good!" But if the seller only has a personal account, then no, it might not be so good.

I think what this demonstrates is that I'm just a lot more careful about what I bid on: I read auction descriptions carefully, ask about shipping costs ahead of time, and make sure everything seems to be kosher and acceptable to me. (Yes, I do pay by check sometimes. But not money order - too big a pain in the butt.) Clearly not everyone does this, though.

PayPal does have Premier and Business accounts, which do accept credit card and international payments. The drawback? They charge a fee for receiving them: 2.9% of the transaction + 30 cents - not a huge amount, but that's on top of the eBay fees. Why pay those fees if you don't have to? Just use a personal account! Sure, I can only receive $500/month, but that's way more business than I do anyway!

Worse, once you have a Premier account, you get charged the fees on all incoming payments, not just the credit card ones. Which seems just plain wrong to me.

Can you have more than one account? Yes, but each account has to have a separate e-mail address, bank account and credit card backing it. Like I have more than one bank account.

It all seems like a subtle and annoying scam to me. On top of all this, PayPal is really bad at communication, not really explaining why some payments sent to my personal account were being held rather than just accepted. I've provided them with feedback just to improve their communication, but to no avail.

Sigh.

So you can see where this is going: I had a bunch of stuff up for sale on eBay this past week, and was hit with a flood of people who didn't understand the restrictions.

So I made the following calculation: It is worth it to me to pay the transaction fees to avoid the hassle of miscommunication, misunderstandings, and dealing with people trying to figure out how to send me international money orders?

And I decided that the answer is yes.

So I upgraded to a Premier PayPal account tonight.

My pragmatism finally won out over my stubbornness, but I feel like I lost the game somehow.

Grr.

Still, I'm trying to look at it as getting something for stuff that was just sitting in my closet. So maybe that'll help me get over it.

Maybe.