Good Riddance, PayPal ⇥ elliotjaystocks.com

Elliot Jay Stocks:

In all honesty, I knew a freeze had to be coming. I received a phone call from PayPal last week, during which I answered several questions about the nature of my business, such as the price, frequency, circulation, and delivery of each issue. The lady on the phone was polite, but clearly interested in the space of time between orders being placed and magazines being shipped: it was obvious she was dubious about whether or not my customers’ orders were technically pre-sales, which is what scares PayPal so much, and is the reason for their paranoia surrounding conference tickets. I knew this, which was why I’d intentionally been closing the gap between orders and shipment: issue 5 was being printed while we opened the shop and is being shipped this week. I also explained to her that technically it wasn’t a pre-sale, since every single customer receives an automatically-generated link to the PDF edition with they order receipt. She made lots of positive ‘mmmm’ sounds and said ‘that’s good’ a lot, but when she said that they’d be in touch again in a few days once they’d concluded their inspection of my account, I wasn’t holding out too much hope.

PayPal is one of the worst companies on the internet, and I’ve almost completely stopped giving them my business. For services I render, I request payment through wire transfer, Interac, or even cheque. While the latter is less convenient than an electronic transfer, I know I won’t have the issues I might potentially have with PayPal.

As a customer, I’ve used a few different payment systems. By far the easiest and best-implemented is Stripe, because they process credit cards directly. I suspect Square is pretty fair as well.

PayPal can rot in a hole.