Not the easiest solution but I would suggest not using PayPal. Much more issues there than just using credit card, and as you noticed nobody there to care.
Wait until they ban your account and there again is nobody to talk to.
What's the best alternative?
It's easy to say "don't use PayPal" but if you're going to say it, you need to do the hard part of suggesting a viable alternative for eCommerce that has as broad a reach and acceptance as PayPal. Stripe? Almost none of the outlets I do business with use it. Venmo? Same company as PayPal. Back to using credit card numbers? The more we spread those around online, the higher the chance they get stolen and used, probably in refund scams like the one OP describes.
People need an alternative with some degree of trust and most consumers, by my reckoning anyway, would prefer a single entity that is accepted everywhere. Right now, that's unfortunately PayPal.
Personally I've had way less issues with stripe, especially in terms of fraud detection.
Also not sure what and where business is but in Europe it's common to just use a proxy provider where credit card is just one of many options and you use a central gateway (similar to stripe)
You'd have to check your local options. At least one of my local banks offers something more advanced than PayPal. And there are several of these proxy providers in my country.
Edit:// if you just want low fee, fast and risk free transactions we all know there is only crypto
Yeah. It’s ridiculous how crypto gets so much hate here, yet there are constant, often heart wrenching posts about the failures and even near-malfeasance of payment processing systems. The paradoxical claims that crypto has no use case except fraud and crime, juxtaposed with the lamentation and gnashing of teeth over the misery of traditional payment systems is enough to provoke an existential examination of the senses.
I honestly think it must be mostly sour grapes, since by far, cash and other traditional payment methods facilitate the vast, vast majority of crime and fraud, and cryptocurrency is the only universally accessible, trustless, (nearly) costless, instant, global system for the transfer of value between two parties.
It is by far a better system, even with its flaws. Which is why, yes, many criminals use it, just as they use cash. Because it works.
Nobody claims that crypto doesn't have a use case. They claim that it has failed at its use case. You can't use it to buy things easily or safely. Buying a bunch of crypto on the internet and looking at a graph every day hoping the line goes up isn't useful.
Its use case is still fraud and crime: when laundering money or fencing stolen goods, you expect the process to be difficult, dangerous and to have to pay a large fee. Crypto is a clear improvement on older criminal methods. It's not an improvement on credit cards.
Plenty of digital places accepting crypto like Namecheap, Vultr, ..,
Plenty of companies where you can sell and receive whatever currency you prefer. More or less instantly in case of some. Yes also to my EUR/CHF bank account. For Switzerland that's $1000 per day (per service) without any deep verification.
Some banks even offering "instant transfer" where you get a debit card and just pay with the crypto on your account. Swissquote to name one with all proper banking requirements and barely any fees.
Also from the point of a seller that has seen many kind of weird disputed and scams I am happy to not have any of these issues with crypto. This is an very obvious improvement over credit cards.
Not saying the world is fine, but blaming crypto (the most transparent payment method ever) is way to simple and far from our financial reality
Idk, my experience is that it works fine.
Even to the point that the cost of maintaining other payment systems was less cost effective than just dropping them and focusing on crypto only. FWIW we are not a “crypto” business, our focus is kinodynamics.
Our market is global and we are small from a payment perspective in this context, so our case may be a bit of an outlier, but our lived experience does directly contradict your claim.
I agree that speculation and crime is a problem, but the speculation market in global commerce and currency dwarfs crypto, así does the criminal usage of cash, so it’s disingenuously myopic to frame those as a crypto-centric issue.
The relative difficulties of regulation because of the decentralized nature of crypto does make it a hotbed for schemes that wouldn’t be practical under local regulations, but I have a hard time getting riled up about that when we have giant state sponsored gambling industries nearly worldwide.
If you were to compare the impact on criminal activity if you eliminated cash vs eliminating crypto, I think it’s easy to see that eliminating cash would be much more detrimental to criminal activity.
In all, the arguments being made are not at all based on a rational examination of verifiable ground truths. They are almost to a fault emotionally based arguments with a near hysterical pitch woven into them from the start.
It seems like some people fear crypto. I don’t know why, but they do. On some level, they fear the threat it poses to the devil they know, perhaps. Maybe that is why they react the way they do.
I am also amazed by the resistance to change here as there is a system clearly more efficient and transparent. It's just a matter of time in my opinion. BTW you can remove the (nearly) in "(nearly) costless", some solutions provide 0 fees and no inflation.
By more efficient you mean taking hours to settle? And no inflation as in Bitcoin level volatility and up?
I'd love an efficient and cheap option to move funds online - especially for micro payments too. But so far I haven't heard of any crypto option that actually stayed around long enough to prove these things.
Happy to be pointed in the right direction here.
Stablecoins on any number of low cost networks are fine for small payments (I haven’t lost anything, not even $0.01 in 10+years, vs tens of thousands in chargebacks, mostly fraudulent, for credit card processors).
I factor in 2.5% total costs for transaction frictions, historically that is a bit over 3x our actual average cost from payer to bank account, but it would easily cover the occasional loss of a day or two of sales in a catastrophe.
Pick a top 5 stablecoin that has a good reputation and at least 3 years, on a network with at least that, and settle your accounts daily, or whenever the accumulation represents a significant dent if lost.
The approximate aggregate risk-cost of major (top 10) stablecoins is somewhere south of .001% per day, and is better than the aggregate risk-cost of national fiat currencies, which unremarkably collapse or suffer catastrophic inflation and rebasing on a regular basis. There are frequently several undergoing this process at any given time.
> The approximate aggregate risk-cost of major (top 10) stablecoins is somewhere south of .001% per day, and is better than the aggregate risk-cost of national fiat currencies
This thinking is dangerous and stupid. Learn from history: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Wednesday
This "stablecoin" garbage needs to die yesterday: a lot of people are going to lose their shirt when the first one blows up. Fixing exchange rates is folly, yet here we go again...
Why would I care if a stablecoin blows up? My payment cost allocation more than compensates for that possibility and my losses in a worst case scenario would be eclipsed to oblivion by the cost savings I have already realized.
> my losses in a worst case scenario would be eclipsed to oblivion by the cost savings I have already realized.
Please elaborate :)
My theoretical potential losses compared to the costs of the payment processsors I ditched, and the chargebacks we used to deal with.
International payment processing is quite expensive, both on a teansaction and on an administrative basis.
My worst case total risk exposure is approximately the same as the cost of 3 months of payment processing overhead, without counting fraudulent chargebacks and “we are going to freeze your account because we can” risks.
FWIW in the last 60 years I have lost way more money to fraud and theft dealing with banks and cash then I ever will using cryptocurrency. On a total, or a percentage basis. I see the risk profile, when properly managed, to be much, much lower using blockchain solutions.
> My worst case total risk exposure is approximately the same as the cost of 3 months of payment processing
Okay, yes: what you're describing is the actual utility of these things.
I think you underestimate how many people dealing in them are using them much less intelligently than you are.
They are being marketed in an extremely dishonest way, as a safe long term store of value. I regularly overhear normal people at my local bars talking about how they're "investing big in stablecoins" and it terrifies me.
>>This "government issued fiat currency" garbage needs to die yesterday: a lot of people are going to lose their shirt when the first one blows up.
What you are saying is a risk endemic to all fiat currencies, including stablecoins.
All symbolically represented forms of value quantization are subject to a failure of confidence. Cryptocurrencies are nothing new in this regard. All money is memetic in nature.
That's like saying "base jumping isn't really more dangerous than flying commercial, after all we're all going to die anyway".
Fiat currencies have militaries. Your stablecoin doesn't.
That’s one of the reason the stablecoins won’t be taking my assets? Idk what your point is but it doesn’t seem like you are debating from a point of rational examination.
Weird, people on the internet spewing BS? Who’d have thought?
Well, losing three months of revenue is going to really hurt when the stablecoin inevitably eats shit: hope you're prepared for that.
The risk is obviously lower because you aren't parking money there. I could certainly see how you might come out ahead in fees for certain international transactions.
But your original claim was that the aggregate risk-cost of dealing in stablecoins is lower than real currencies, and that is absolutely preposterous: you aren't accounting for all the risks.
What's wrong with Trustly, Adyen and others among the ~40 alternatives we maintained integrations with at the casino operator I was working at almost ten years ago?
Haven't heard of them at all, that's what's wrong.
They may be great services, of course, being that I, a single consumer, am not a barometer for the success of a payment platform. But whoever they are, they're not being used by major retailers, distributors or manufacturers that I shop with both personally and professionally.
IIRC Ebay uses Adyen. I think Paypal uses Trustly in some significant markets.
I don't know why they didn't show up early in your research, as they are among the most well known and easy to find. Ingrid is lesser known and mostly active in e-commerce in the european markets.
Adyen are everywhere for in-person payments where I live (Ireland).
Worldpay/Stripe seem to be the most common providers for ecommerce.
More generally, payments are painful so finding a good provider is very, very important.
> Wait until they ban your account
Ban your account and prevent you from accessing any funds in that account.
I don't think you can manage payments between multiple users with most card processors?