I look it at the opposite. As a user, the only thing Paypal protects is your credit card info. Your personal information (name and address) gets passed on to the merchant regardless. There's zero risk to us consumers for stolen credit card numbers, so why would I care about that? Instead, Paypal costs more for the merchants, and I'd prefer the merchant stays in business so I'll use their preferred payment system. Plus, why do I want Paypal keeping their own record of everything I purchase?
Thus I only use Paypal when there are no other options.
If you're using a credit (NOT DEBIT) card number in the US, you have zero liability for unauthorized and fraudulent transactions. You can even get your credit card issuer to--usually--go to bat for you in the case of "not as described" transactions, too. So there's theoretically no risk to you as a buyer using a credit card because if it doesn't work out, you just tell your credit card issuer to go get the money back.
This is, supposedly, one reason why PINs on chip cards weren't adopted widely here. The customer can, with relative ease and usual success, reverse the charge so what does it matter if someone makes off with a card?
The key is credit cards instead of debit. Your chargeback rights are much more limited with a debit card and a debit card means your money has been held up, not the card issuer's.
Filing a chargeback and getting a new card issued is a genuine pain in the ass, especially if you have a lot of recurring card payments. Filing a dispute on PayPal is pretty much painless.
Many people only have one credit card so having it temporally unavailable due to fraud issues is a hardship. If you're not good with computers it can also be a challenge to reconfigure all your automatic payments.
If you don't have language skills or phone skills reporting the fraud can also be scary.
> Many people only have one credit card so having it temporally unavailable due to fraud issues is a hardship.
"Get the Amazon card and get A% on your Amazon purchases." "Get the X card and get X% on your X purchases."
The average American has 2.6 credit cards. People with less money typically have more credit cards. So that's generally not a problem if you're making a purchase in real time.
And they're pretty good about turning your card back on once you sort out the issue, and will actually notify existing merchants of your new card number if it changes, so it's basically the same level of inconvenience sorting it out with the credit card company as sorting it out with Paypal.
Well, speaking as an Australian here, one of the primary reasons for using a credit card is because of the consumer protections it entails. If someone puts through a false charge on my number or steals my credit card, I call up the credit card company and I tell them, it gets marked as stolen, the charge is written off, and I get issued a new card.
Indeed, and this is purely my own personal opinion, there's precious few reasons to use one if not for the consumer protections, and subsequently, i hardly ever use paypal because its just too much of a hassle and I can't see the point in doing more work for less convenience...
You can do that all online with most cards. It's also likely extremely rare that your card number is stolen this way (it's never happened to me as far as I'm aware).
