Hey, everyone — I'm David Marcus, and I've been running PayPal for the past 5 months. Hard for me not to comment on this thread. PayPal brought a lot of goodness to millions of merchants, and hundreds of millions of users around the world. But yes... as the company grew exponentially we were met with growing pains. And developers, merchants, and consumers sometimes had to pay the price for it. I still want to stress that when you manage money at such a scale, you always attract bad people with wrong intentions. Our intention has always been to protect our customers. Not to mess around with our merchants.
I want to share two things with all of you:
#1 — there's a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.
#2 — you have my commitment to make this company GREAT again. We're reinventing how we work, our products, our platforms, our APIs, and our policies. This WILL change, and we won't rest until you all see it. The first installments are due very soon. So stay tuned...
I don't know if this post is legit but if it is then you must know that currently:
1. your api is by far the most hated one in the space. the only good thing about it is the sandbox.
2. there were many instances where you were greedy ( diaspora, wikileaks). Alot of stories in IM forums that you freeze money from vendors and never return the money ( to either side).
3. tens of thousands vendors are waiting for stripe to go abroad including me so we could run away from your draconian "service"
this post is legit (see my last tweet to confirm it to citricsquid). Trust me, I know about this. And this will change. What we have in store is really good, and I know it will take time to rebuild our credo with the dev community, but we're committed, and again... you will like what you will soon see.
David, no dev out there is waiting at home thinking "oh my gosh paypal says something good is going to happen i can't wait". This only happens only to credible service from companies that are trusted by the community. No one cares about what is going to happen in the FUTURE, we care about NOW (i have ~35k dollars a month paid by pp and i can't change paypal's generic call to action template that i know from past a/b testing will make me and you more money). paypal's gate-keeping state of mind is going to back fire hard, better believe it because it's coming.
Just the other day I was asked to buy a conference ticket via Paypal. I declined and other arrangements were made.
What it would take to restore credibility in my view at this point is apologizing and making up for the antique violin incident and un-blacklisting Wikileaks.
Well, let' start by Paypal recognizing that money in an account usually belongs to the account owner. Automated behaviour checks went wrong too often, resulting in account freezes. No answer from Paypal what the offense was, of course "for security reasons".
Paypal, your transparency sucks. If my account is fishy, tell what it is. We're no longer in the McCarthy times.
And besides, I'm living in the EU. US rules are not always popular for us.
I love the idea behind PayPal. Always did. But if my customers have to wait 10 for a login page to come, many leave these days. Experts say it is a requirement to get below 2. Please, get lightning-fast, it's lost money for all of us.
I have to say I do like the new business phone number which every time seems to connect me to a friendly and helpful person each time.
That's where the positives end for me however. For Paypal, I fear it's too little too late. You've done too much damage to yourselves. I get the reasons why you do things, but the communication over the last years has been atrocious.
We're in the UK and are just waiting for Stripe to come over. I think a lot of other businesses are thinking along the same lines as well.
Your fee structure is pretty expensive as well. There's also a lot of hidden costs:
- We're on an upper tier so should have a reduced commission rate. However, after scratching my head for ages as to why a majority of our sales are not at the lowered rate I finally find the link about cross border fees or whatever reason you use to charge us more. As an example, some of our $119 USD sales have $4.35 fees which is ~3.7%. Our current rate it says on our account should be 1.9%. Your fees structure is not as clear as it should be.
- Have you tried issuing a refund in a different currency? You have to draw money from your bank (even if there are available funds), which is converted to the correct currency which because your spreads as so expensive means sometimes refunds cost us money. I phoned up about this and they told me to open different currency balances which I did and which fixed the issue, but again, bad communication and a broken process
- Related to the previous point, your spreads on foreign conversions are high. I think they've improved a bit over the last couple of years but I still consider them an expensive hidden cost. I contacted Stripe asking what spreads they offer, and they told me they would consider it a hidden cost and they offer customers the same spreads the banks give them.
The support person didn't do anything about it. I didn't expect them to though, as Paypal is an impenetrable behemoth that doesn't seem to care about these sorts of things.
Your website being as slow as it is, mind numbingly slow, is honestly enough reason alone for me to move service. Trying to find transactions just is a huge waste of my time waiting for each page to load. Try using your sandbox with pages that load that slow.
> there's a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.
Every time I've called PayPal I get connected to a real person. Once they even proactively called me to warn me of suspicious behaviour on my account. My account (which I've used to make thousands of dollars in payments for years now) has been blocked by them several times and every time a quick call sorts things out. I wonder if I am the norm and OP is the exception or vice versa?
Yes, but just for my part I'd certainly let them take another couple of percent (on top of the 3.9% I'm already paying with Pro) for better service :-)
I want to share two things with all of you:
#1 — there's a massive culture change happening at PayPal right now. If we suck at something, we now face it, and we do something about it.
#2 — you have my commitment to make this company GREAT again. We're reinventing how we work, our products, our platforms, our APIs, and our policies. This WILL change, and we won't rest until you all see it. The first installments are due very soon. So stay tuned...