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Paypal sucks
Posted by liquilife on 11/03 at 10:09 AM
Filed under Miscellaneous
Where to start. We have been using Paypal for about 3 years. I have read many stories regarding PayPal, frozen accounts and general inaccessibility of funds. This never happened with our account so we continued to use Paypal, even going so far as using the Paypal credit card to easily access our funds. This has all ended, below is an account of our problems with Paypal and reasons why you should never use Paypal again.
Story 1
I am a freelance web designer making some extra money in my free time. I’ve used Paypal happily for several years to accept payments. However, one day recently I was at Target to pick up Guitar Hero III. The game was a little over $100 and I had enough money in my Paypal account to cover this plus an extra $20. Using my paypal credit card I excitedly run to the register to buy the long awaited Guitar Hero III. Oops, the cash register crashed while processing my payment. No biggie, they take me to another register to ring up my purchase. The problem here is even though there was no transaction that took place, the Target credit card billing machine did have time to contact Paypal to verify I actually had the funds. This automatically put my $100 on “pending”. The bigger problem is I never actually made a purchase and Target has no record of requesting the money. Ok, the clerk is understanding and we call the number on the back of the Paypal credit card so we can remove the “pending” status. Guess what? It’s not that easy.
After holding for 40 minutes (yes, 40 minutes on a early Sunday morning) a semi-friendly customer service rep from Paypal notifies me to wait 5 days for the pending status to be removed. I don’t want this, I want to use my Paypal credit card to make the purchase, simple enough. She reluctantly offers a solution for Target to fax over an authorization on official letter head to remove the pending status and it will be reviewed in 5 - 10 business days. What?? The process to remove a pending status takes longer then it would actually be on pending? This was no solution. Fast forward through some cursing and I am no on hold for a manager.
Speaking to the manager I quickly inform her that I want this $100 purchase off of pending now, not 5 days from now. I explained it was simply a mistake from Target and that Target is ready to do anything they need to verify that it is ok to remove the pending status. The manager, reluctantly, instructs me to have Target fax over the authorization and she will verify it’s arrival and remove the pending status. Great! A solution.
The clerk from Target arrives back with a printed confirmation that the authorization was faxed over, and with the manager waiting on the line with me, puts me on hold to check the arrival of the fax. She comes back on the line and informs me it was not received. I confirm the number on the fax confirmation and it’s correct. Ok, so the clerk once again faxes over the authorization. The manager puts me on hold to only to come back 5 minutes later informing me that the fax inbox is empty. Geeeezus. I’ve got two printed fax confirmations in my hand and Paypal is telling me they never received it. I’m a bit upset at this point and explain to the Paypal manager that we’ve done everything she has asked yet it is still impossible to remove the pending status, what gives? Her explanation is “I am sorry, but you are at fault for this and there is nothing more I am willing to do.” That was pretty much the end of the phone call as I did not want to make a fool of myself and lose control of my language while in the target store on the phone. I’m out $90 for 5 days simply because a cash register crashed at Target. It’s not the end of the world as it was easy to run home and grab my other lesser used Visa credit card and buy the game. It’s the service of this company whom we all entrust with some portion of our money and financial transactions. Paypal really sucks, but it gets worse.
Story 2
My wife is an artist, she works full time drawing cartoon dolls and has used Paypal to receive her weekly payments. The company she works with pays about 6 other employees via Paypal as well, never having any issues. All is gravy until a week after my previous incident. It’s Friday and Anna (my wife) logs into her Paypal account to verify her usual payment. She is surprised to see the status of her payment labeled as “Hindered”. What in the hell, this is new. After a call to Paypal it is discovered that the payment will be on hold for a minimal 10 days while they do a “routine but random’ check on the payer, in this case Anna’s employer. Furthermore, she finds out that all payments made by this company was put on hold for a minimal 10 days for this ‘routine but random’ check. Several employees are very upset as they rely on Paypal to quickly receive payment cross country to deposit into an actual bank account or use with their Paypal credit card.
Who in the holy hell deters a payment from processing for 10 days or longer on a random basis? Paypal, that’s who. Calling Paypal is useless, they will not and do not budge. You might as well be speaking to a rock. You can have an absolutely 100% perfect record and Paypal will still decide to put you in a HUGE bind by locking down your payments for up to 10 days on random. Worse yet, they explain this process as their attempt to “make your experience with Paypal more secure and satisfying”. Satisfying my ASS.
Summary
Paypal is grossly incompetent to manage money. My wife and I made the mistake of putting some faith in Paypal because of no previous issues in the past. I made the mistake of not taking all the horror stories to heart and acting on it. Any company that has to put a payment on hold for 10 days to perform random checks on money senders is very much incompetent and not up to par with any other money sending/receiving service.
A company who’s general process to remove money off of a pending status takes longer then the time they keep a pending status should tell you something about their competence.
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