
PayPal: 'Aggressive changes' coming to frozen funds policy - michaelhoffman
http://money.cnn.com/2013/01/21/technology/paypal-frozen-funds/
======
AlexMuir
"We're at risk from upstarts in every sector of our business. Developers hate
us."

"All hands on deck! We've got to get the communications team together and put
out the best damn press release we've ever done."

"But we don't have anything to announce."

"Just announce that we'll be making an announcement soon. An aggressive
announcement."

"Ok, I'll put it in with the cheque for our last batch of commercials - that
should ensure we get prominent coverage and see off the likes of Stripe - I'd
like to see them get an empty press release onto CNN.com this fast."

~~~
DannyBee
Close. The aggressive change they are making is, in fact, the press. IE Paypal
is making aggressive changes (in how they communicate to the press that they
think they've done nothing wrong)

~~~
rhizome
To their credit, they didn't use the word "terrorist," once.

------
Silhouette
To save everyone the trouble... This article is just a PR parrot piece, with
no real substance or timelines beyond "aggressive changes" and "the next
several months".

It just feels like a desperate attempt to convince potential clients not to go
with competing services for a bit longer, like the new guy who took over at
the top, showed up in person on a few on-line forums to say positive-sounding
things, and then disappeared without trace.

Amusingly, the PR rep quoted in this article actually seems quite proud that
when they screw up and freeze an innocent client's account and then demand a
bunch of non-existent and inappropriate records to release the funds, the
client won't be expected to submit them _in the mail_ any more.

~~~
rhizome
What are good alternatives? I'm considering taking online payments for my
freelancing work, but I'm gunshy that it could kill my cashflow without
recourse if a company acted toward me like PayPal often does to others.

~~~
Silhouette
It depends a lot on where you are. You might find this HN discussion from a
few hours ago interesting:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5091069>

------
coderdude
I'd wager that most of the people you see bagging on PayPal have:

1) Never used them in a business capacity

2) Have only read horror stories

3) Take those stories at face value

The horror stories usually have an obvious, "duh" kind of reasoning behind
them when you step back and think about it from PayPal's point of view. Big
influx of sales out of nowhere? That's a flagging. Accepting money for some
kind of charity? That's a flagging.

I'm very satisfied with their service. They work to protect your money, your
customers' money, and their reputation. If you're an entrepreneur and you
aren't sure what payment processor to go with, don't exclude PayPal from
consideration.

~~~
dangrossman
I've been taking payments with PayPal for 13 years this June. I feel exactly
the same. Not only has their service and support always been excellent for me,
they're by far the most economical option, at first glance (the effective
transaction rate is lower than any other 3rd party processor, or the 3
traditional merchant account providers I've used), and on closer scrutiny (the
fraud screening and dispute resolution mean I keep more of the money I get
paid through PayPal than by credit card directly).

~~~
ROFISH
I agree with this sentiment for having over 4 years of heavy use. They have
plenty of things that need updating (slow history, API sucks), but at least I
get great support if I have trouble and need to call. The 2.2% fees aren't
bad; not a great rate either, but it's keeping me from moving to Stripe, which
has worse fees. Note that I have a traditional ecommerce store who sells real
physical items.

------
jakejake
I find this quote from the article ironic:

"Nayar said he can't go into specifics about what will change, but
transparency is a major focus."

~~~
skot9000
Having dealt (attempted to deal) with PayPal after my 10 year old account was
randomly frozen, I have come to the conclusion the PayPal is run by robots.
Poorly programmed robots.

------
JulianWasTaken
This is great news.

Not because I care at all about PayPal's practices anymore, but because it
might mean that enough people have joined the backlash and boycott to make
PayPal take notice.

------
flxmglrb
This is literally more than a decade overdue. The very first "sucks" site I
ever heard of was none other than paypalsucks.com way back in the early 2000s,
and even at that time it heavily documented this and many other issues with
PayPal's service.

Awesome response time guys!

------
DigitalSea
I feel like we've heard this all before countless times. Paypal has been
poorly managed for a very long time. Their dictator like ways of, "We're
freezing your account and keeping your money unless you send us all of your
receipts proving all transactions are legitimate" have screwed so many over
the years. I think it's a little too late to repair Paypal's image, the
customer support staff are the least human like support staff I've ever dealt
with. All responses from Paypal customer support are copied and pasted, 99% of
the time ignoring what you've actually typed out. Maybe they should fix that
problem while they're there.

I seriously doubt these aggressive changes will change anything, if they do it
will probably only reduce the number of incorrectly frozen accounts by a small
percentage. Paypal will always be brought down by their uneducated, non-
compassionate customer support staff and their horrible policies. While my
experience with them on a business level has been somewhat limited (I do have
a business premier pro account) and I myself haven't had any serious issues,
I've been through the frozen funds thing before but came out unscathed
although after digging through the crappy support and finally getting someone
with enough drive and compassionate to ensure my problems were resolved.

The number one problem isn't the policies, because a lot of people have
nothing but good experiences with Paypal it's their staff, the people on the
front-line who ensure your queries are appropriately directed and brought to
the attention of the right people internally to solve your problem, these
staff are misinterpreting policies and not listening. Another tolerable
problem is Paypal's API: it feels archaic and pretty poor in comparison to
other payment competitors with much nicer JSON API's and support for
Javascript payments processing like Square. Paypal really need to step up
their game, they've still got a chance considering the deep integration into
Gumtree and eBay.

------
mtgx
What about their arbitrary policies about freezing certain types of
businesses' funds or not allowing them to operate using Paypal because they
don't like them - like say if you sell a certain type of books?

------
DiabloD3
Too little too late. Bitcoin already won (and for those naysayers that think
Bitcoin will never win, theres at least three popular Paypal clones out there
too)

~~~
jfoster
I'm not going to say that Bitcoin will never win, but why do you think Bitcoin
has already won? I've never even seen it as an available payment method on a
site, and people employed outside of the tech industry generally haven't heard
of it.

~~~
MacsHeadroom
Three of the top 1000 websites in the world started accepting bitcoins in the
past few months--most notably Wordpress.
[http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2011/12/bitcoin-bounty-
ladde...](http://www.thebitcointrader.com/2011/12/bitcoin-bounty-ladder.html)

Thousands of other sites and hundreds of real life locations accept bitcoins--
many exclusively. I get unsolicited questions about Bitcoin from non-tech
people who see my posts about it just about every day. The coming Bitcoin
update is specifically meant to make Bitcoin much more non-tech friendly. I
greatly anticipate swaths of non-tech users buying in very soon.

I think it's a little early to say Bitcoin has "won" against Paypal when the
BTC market cap only just recently broke $200 Million USD. But it is certainly
here to stay. Bitcoin's exponentially increasing global adoption rate all but
ensures that it will be around for a long time to come.

------
elchief
so, Stripe is eating their lunch then...

~~~
jayfuerstenberg
Too little too late for Paypal.

This was always the most pressing problem they've always continued to ignore
and now their hubris is going to hurt them.

I hope Stripe buries them and I hope this case is taught in business schools
the world over.

------
olefoo
It's about time. I do wonder to what extent the brand damage already done will
be a drag on their usage numbers.

------
stickydink
The one thing they don't say in this article is that they will be even
attempting to reduce the number of frozen accounts. Instead, just make it a
clearer process to get out of.

If they stopped doing seemingly arbitrary freezes, this would solve both
problems.

------
nonamegiven
It's been so long that paypal has had their reputation, I can't _imagine_
using their services based on a statement from _paypal_.

paypal and godaddy -- I mean, come on, why would you if you didn't have to?

~~~
Karunamon
Because you use eBay, because they're the 1000lb gorilla that everybody knows.

And, because they're the biggest host out there, because their prices are
actually really good, because they're the 1000lb gorilla that everybody knows.

------
wereHamster
The article doesn't mention Bitcoin as an alternative :(

~~~
superuser2
That's because Bitcoin is an alternative currency and Paypal is a credit card
processor. Until all of our mothers are comfortable with and capable of
exchanging USD to Bitcoin and then paying with it (as well as paying the BTC
exchange's percentage in addition to the purchase price of what they're
buying), Bitcoin is not an alternative to traditional USD credit card
processors and should not be treated as one.

------
yuhong
I still remember this: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4494216>

------
cdvonstinkpot
I hope to see a follow up with details on what exactly they've done, in the
near future.

