
PayPal.Me - napolux
https://www.paypal.me/
======
TomGullen
Paypal, sort out the problems you've had for years on your main site:

* Incredibly slow page loads * I have to login twice each time * If I browse too many pages, the query string gets so long my requests fail * It goes on and on

~~~
solaris999
Good on you for listing your gripes with them. Too often I see people
complaining about PayPal in general but I've managed to miss actual reasons
before now.

~~~
nailer
Normally it's because their account is suddenly closed, without any reason
given, and no correspondence is entered into.

Also they're happy to support hate groups, but blacklisted wikileaks.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
Yup, this.

Things like getting your funds frozen by Paypal when you're a legitimate
business and handed over a fuckton of documentation and proof of legitimate
orders to prove it. Which then destroys your cashflow, which means the typical
'pay in 30 days' that is extremely common in business 2 business transactions
gets messed up because Paypal froze your money. You can't pay your supplier,
your order doesn't come in, meanwhile you've been shipping your product to
your customers despite the fact all the revenue from these orders is getting
insta-frozen, and now you're starting to actually get legitimate issues of
customers not getting their product because you can't pay your supplier for
new product and can't ship to your customers, which makes Paypal clamp down
ever harder to 'resolve these issues before we unfreeze the account', which of
course is an issue they created and an issue that can't be solved because
they're kidnapping your money.

So now you need to find external financing (we're not talking about Amazon
here, but commonly 1 or 2 people selling products from their home, the
internet's mom & pop stores) to fund the supplier's order, then ship, cancel
customer's orders so you can prove to Paypal you can ship to every placed
order (who leave negative feedback, understandably), and see customers cancel
orders themselves (more negative feedback), and then unfreeze the money, pay
back your financier, place another order with a supplier and hope to regain
lost customers.

And that's the simple story, the true story is extremely frustrating and much
more complex with cashflow being frozen for 6 months while you're trying to
keep your business alive. Not everyone wants to recount it every time they
want to criticise Paypal.

Now if there were legitimate concerns, cool. But as nailer said, you can find
tons of stories of people who ran into these issues for no reason and without
a reason given, without due dilligence and without the type of 'reasonably
swift' (i.e. days or at most weeks, not 6 months) recourse & resolution of
frozen cashflow you need to run a business without going bankrupt.

A tip, if anyone ever does a product launch with Paypal, call them beforehand.
Launching a product and selling in a spike the first days/weeks (i.e.
extremely typical for virtually every launch ever) is a red flag for Paypal.

Which means for anyone doing a pre-order, well you're fucked if you get
unlucky. Plenty of stories of people doing a legitimate pre-order campaign
with customers willing to wait say 2 months on the product. Halfway through
your pre-order campaign you think 'alright I'm at $60k right now, I'll
probably make it to $100k. I'll start to order from my supplier about $80k's
worth for now to be on the safe side. You pay $25k of your own money upfront'.
Campaign is over, you reached $100k, your supplier is busy, you call him up to
adjust to $100k, and tell him you'll pay the remaining $75k right away. Turns
out all your money is frozen. Supplier won't ship, Paypal won't unfreeze the
money for months. You inform your customers, they're sad. 3% of them files a
complaint with Paypal for a refund, which now means that 100% of Paypal's
feedback from customers about you is negative, seeing as you haven't been able
to ship to anyone yet.

You might think well good, Paypal protects its users from fraud (despite a
total ignorance as to how normal pre-orders work, thereby screwing over their
users), but this stuff happens to people who've done business with Paypal for
5-10 years. It happens to companies with solid internet reputations that takes
5 seconds to review on the internet or with a phonecall whether they're
legitimate.

And that's the 'normal' stuff, i.e. selling a videogame, a bracelet, a usb
charger etc... But if we get to the really controversial stuff, like omg sex
on video, I know I should use the p-word but I'll just say it, porn... did
that get censored? Well then you're out of luck with Paypal entirely, which is
insane.

~~~
ascagnel_
Also worth noting that their terms are pretty seller- and user-hostile. You
described some of the seller-hostile instances above (here's another [0] from
a few years back).

But they've also rolled out some pretty user-hostile stuff in the past year.
At one point, they were set to roll out a new privacy agreement that included
permission for them to robo-call you at phone numbers that you hadn't provided
to them (with no mention of how those numbers were obtained).[1]

[0] [http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/paypal-shreds-ostensibly-
ra...](http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/paypal-shreds-ostensibly-rare-violin-
because-it-cares/) [1] [http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/paypal-claims-it-
will-allow...](http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/05/paypal-claims-it-will-allow-
customers-to-opt-out-of-robocalls-and-texts-permitted-in-new-policy/)

------
BillPond
Based on my previous paypal experiences, I would rather send my money with any
of the other money platforms that are out there.

~~~
swagswag
Square or Stripe?

~~~
BillPond
Every friend circle uses a different service, but its mostly facebook or
square. No issues with either!

------
nicpottier
Deja vu?

For those of us who have been around a while, we might remember this as being
PayPal's original purpose in life. I remember paying back friends for lunch
using PayPal and feeling like we were living in the future.

Only later did PayPal move into the merchant space more seriously. Maybe my
memory is poor and they launched with merchants at the same time but it took a
few years for me to ever purchase anything with PayPal, it was all between
consumers before.

So ya, welcome back PayPal?

~~~
colinbartlett
I remember when PayPal was x.com. You'd tell people you could send them money
via text message and they'd say, "What's a text message?"

------
mmackh
It's fun to get in on services early and have the choice of a username:
[https://www.paypal.me/more](https://www.paypal.me/more)

~~~
mangeletti
Tell me about it: [https://www.paypal.me/signup](https://www.paypal.me/signup)

It looks like somebody already grabbed
[https://www.paypal.me/login](https://www.paypal.me/login)

~~~
praseodym
I grabbed [https://www.paypal.me/pages](https://www.paypal.me/pages) \-
suprised it worked considering
[https://www.paypal.me/pages/faqs](https://www.paypal.me/pages/faqs),
[https://www.paypal.me/pages/terms](https://www.paypal.me/pages/terms) and
[https://www.paypal.me/pages/1337](https://www.paypal.me/pages/1337)

------
gorena
I attempted to sign up with a 50 character 1Password-generated password, and
was told that passwords cannot be longer than 20 characters.

I can't see any reason for this other than that they're storing them either
encrypted or in cleartext.

Use with caution.

~~~
atonse
Normally I'd cry foul but 20 alphanumeric characters (roughly 64^20, or 1e36
combinations) is more than sufficient.

~~~
chaz72
The issue is not the 20 characters, but the underlying reason for it. There's
no technical reason they would need it unless they were storing it insecurely.

Granted it's possible they're limiting it to 20 for a nontechnical reason, but
I have some 40-character passwords in a password manager. Long passwords are
not only reasonable, but this is a giant alarm bell if they even imply they
might be storing them insecurely.

~~~
nicpottier
What are you talking about? Taken to its logical conclusion you would have
sites support passwords up to a million characters or else it is a sign that
they are insecure. Having some limit is perfectly sane.

I also find it a bit "armchair quarterbacky" to be calling out PayPal on
security practices. They've been around the block a few times, and though I
certainly don't love them, they aren't making rookie mistakes like not-hashing
passwords or the like.

You are just spreading FUD for no discernable reason. 20 characters while not
the epitome of greatness, isn't a sign of the end times.

~~~
pidg
"armchair quarterbacky" would make quite a good password, but unfortunately
it's 1 character over their limit.

------
praeivis
Sorry about that...PayPal.Me isn't available in your country.

~~~
glogla
I love how you can't even see FAQ or About pages if you're not in the
supported country. That's Google Play Store level UX.

~~~
christop
Even if you are in a supported country, when setting up a page, the "Learn
more about our fees" page is a 404:
[https://www.paypal.com/%7BcoBrand%7D/webapps/mpp/paypal-
fees](https://www.paypal.com/%7BcoBrand%7D/webapps/mpp/paypal-fees)

------
benjaminva
It´s available here in Germany and I feared that fees would apply for every
transaction but learning from the FAQ, when transferring money between
friends/family this is actually free. Given, that in Germany, transactions
between banks are free too, the whole cycle of shifting money should be also
free for Paypal (omitting costs for running the service of course). I am
looking forward to trying it out, it might be much nicer than giving someone
the IBAN and letting him handle the transaction via the bank.

~~~
ruxkor
An alternative in Germany (or any country adhering to the IBAN/BIC numbering
system) is cringle [1]. It uses direct withdrawals (Lastschrift) or wire
transfers and does not require the other party to have a cringle account in
order to receive money, according to their website.

[1]: [https://www.cringle.net](https://www.cringle.net)

~~~
fwn
Cringle transactions are only free since very recently. Prior to that they
wanted something between 10 to 20 cent per transaction. Even worse they seem
to need six days for your transaction. (It's three days per transaction and
they transfer it to their own account in-between)

------
kmfrk
What happened to the story of PayPal handing over users' phone numbers to
robocallers? [https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/06/03/paypal-
robocall...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/06/03/paypal-robocalls)

Did it turn out to be true? I haven't deleted my account yet, but I haven't
made new purchases nor signed any new agreements since then. Especially since
there may not even be a guarantee that they won't do it to people with
"disabeld" accounts.

Edit: I just registered the .me account for my regular name, so I won't have
someone posing as me or getting payments from people who've confused the owner
with me, as a precaution.

------
johnnymonster
paypal is by far the worst payment processing system that I have ever used...

~~~
Aoyagi
Why?

~~~
dijit
Terrible site, slow load times, history of poor security. Disenfranchised
workers and a bureaucratic nightmare. Along with a history of freezing assets
of popular projects for no reason. (wikileaks donations for instance).

[http://www.paypalsucks.com/](http://www.paypalsucks.com/)
[https://www.aboutpaypal.org/](https://www.aboutpaypal.org/)

~~~
Aoyagi
I agree that the site isn't great, but I'd still call that above average,
especially nowadays. Load times are fine for me (using O12). Poor security?
(other than not having two-step authentication)

The rest of the things just comes with it being a huge corporation that
pretends it's not a bank I guess. Funny thing if you search for PP here

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paypal&sort=byPopularity&prefi...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=paypal&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

Didn't they have some "controversial" privacy policy change recently?

Anyway, I still see it as the lesser evil of the widespread totally-not-a-bank
payment processors.

------
Kluny
Tried /reddit, /cocacola, and my first name - all taken. Got /sjg, my
initials, but now I want to go back and get /rocketships, since that's my
domain. Damn! They only let you have one!

------
kome
Just to test, send me money:
[https://paypal.me/martino](https://paypal.me/martino)

Edit: Thank you for your €0,10 kind stranger!

~~~
willis77
Looks like they forgot to test for negative values. I put in -200.00 and it
seems to have withdrawn the money from your account without problems ;)

~~~
kedean
Looks like they solved that, it now disallowed inputting a dash. I wonder if
that's just client-side though.

~~~
kome
kedean... it was a joke...

------
colinsidoti
Ahh I tried doing this with Stripe and Stripe Checkout on StripePal.com but
they wouldn't let me do it because money services businesses aren't allowed :(

I really like this concept though. If I wasn't paranoid about frozen assets I
would be happy to use it.

------
Phogo
They really need to vet these signups, just got,
[http://www.paypal.me/official](http://www.paypal.me/official)

~~~
jessaustin
They need a more complete word list. They specifically disallowed "paypal" and
"bitch", while allowing "official", "pay", etc.

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Geeek
So its like Square cash but owned by PayPal? Thanks but no.

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ahmad19526
Paypal owns Venmo (via the Braintree acquisition). How is this not
cannibalizing on Venmo (whose primary existence is around sending money btwn
friends)...?

~~~
gorena
The Venmo team is a different team, located in NYC instead of California, has
a brand that people actually like, something something middle managers. This
kind of nonsense is standard issue from eBay and I don't think it would have
changed in a month of separation.

~~~
rattray
Venmo has a team in SF now, and eBay doesn't own PayPal anymore.

Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense. This seems like a lower-friction
flow, especially when requesting money from people who have never heard of
Venmo – not everyone trust a payment processor they've never heard of, and
PayPal has much broader awareness than Venmo.

------
_jomo
It doesn't show error messages when a transaction fails, it just does nothing.
I had to look at the JSON response to figure out it was denied.

------
weego
paypal.me/ramen. The new microfunding service for poor oss devs

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jbb555
What is the purpose of this? It's not exactly difficult to transfer money
using your banks website or "paym" to mobile?

This seems to be a solution in search of an actual problem

~~~
colinbartlett
I am guessing you are outside the U.S. because here it's actually a still a
real nuisance to transfer money between banks.

There are plenty of attempts to solve this problem though. Square Cash, Venmo,
etc.

------
jzig
paypal.me/support is available!

~~~
Jarred
no longer!

