PayPal Preparing To Address Frozen Funds Policy 175
First time accepted submitter skywire writes "After years of forcing innocent customers to navigate a Kafkaesque process to unfreeze their funds, PayPal has announced that they are preparing major changes to alleviate the pain. From the article: 'The company routinely freezes funds for 21 days if it thinks there's a fraud risk, and its terms give it the right to extend the freeze for up to 180 days. To get access to their money, users are often asked to provide the kind of documentation that a product seller would have, like several months' worth of sales records. But if you're running a fundraiser or selling tickets to an upcoming conference, you don't have that paperwork. Even for those with extensive paper trails, the appeals process can take months to resolve. The Web is filled with enraged blog posts, websites like paypalsucks.com, and a Tumblr called "Conferences Burned by PayPal."'"
invisible hand (Score:3, Interesting)
It's pretty mind-boggling that nobody has come along and eaten Paypal's lunch yet. For all the internet-era services (most?) that based their business model on merely having the most active accounts and got burned, there are a couple for which that strategy seems to be a winner. Facebook is another one. There's no reason to use either of these services other than the fact that everyone else does - and in fact, there are lots of reasons not to (i.e. the services themselves are ass, and are run in a way that's at times abusive to their userbase).
And yet, despite the fact that there's nothing preventing competitors from springing up (unlike, say, Ticketmaster - which actively uses payola to monopolize the market) - and despite the fact that some with very deep pockets (Google) have tried - Paypal & Facebook still dominate.
Maybe it's luck? At some point someone will set up a competing service that just happens to ensnare the particular, unmarked, and unrelated 5% group of "tastemakers" who are sufficient to catalyze a shift away to a new service?
Re:Too Late (Score:4, Interesting)
Credit card policies are not very different
Most of the sellers I read about we're just dumb
Reminds me of a funny story (Score:5, Interesting)
Too little too late (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
Commission requirement (Score:4, Interesting)
For commercial seller Amazon seems to be the vastly superior service.
This is true for commercial sellers. But for sellers who don't pay $40 per month for a store, Amazon hits them with a $1 per item commission in addition to the final value fee. And items without a UPC/EAN or ISBN can't be sold at all.
Re:Too Late (Score:5, Interesting)
None of these has really garnered much marketshare, despite Paypal's evils. Although an interesting payments model, its customer service is an oxymoron. When you've got auction funds tied up from eBay, or there's a question to your business model, they shoot their clientele first, look for blood, and allow questions to be asked later.
If the US banking laws were real (I know, another oxymoron), Paypal would have the teeth of a hundred US DAs in their leg, gnawing viciously. But they're seemingly exempt, as are all the big financial houses.
Re:In Germany (Score:4, Interesting)
PayPal is now filled with competitiors (Score:4, Interesting)
Now about time for someone to actually challenge eBay. eBid, uBid etc. never gain steam. We need an auction site that takes all sorts of payment methods, including enabling established sellers to accept non-recoursable payment methods like Western Union, Bitcoins etc. to increase liquidity.