Jeff: > On Thursday 10 January 2002 09:09 pm, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote: > >I think that PayPal is a great idea, but I'm not fond of doing business with > > companies that lie to their customers. > By lying to their customers, what do you mean? I think what he's getting at is that PayPal has been deceptive or at least less than forthcoming about some of their policies and practices. They say, for example, that ACH EFT transactions take 3-5 business days. In fact an ACH EFT transaction takes about 1/2 a day. PayPal deliberately holds on to money as long as possible in order to maximize the "float" that they earn interest on. They mis-represent the amount of time these transactions take. If someone pays you with a credit card, even though they can get instant approval of the credit card transaction from the credit card company, they now wait several days before actually posting the funds to your account. This is because they are again trying to maximize the "float" on the funds. They mis-represent the amount of time these transactions take. Basically they have figured out what the absolute outside maximum time they can delay transactions for float purposes is, while not generating "too many" complaints. Naturally I have complained bitterly about these practices but they have not changed their policies, presumably because the majority of people aren't paying close enough attention to the time delays that PayPal introduces, so they don't complain soon enough. If you try to send someone funds from your PayPal "account," they make it very difficult to use a credit card now. This is because the ACH EFT costs only a couple of cents for them to process, whereas the credit card transaction costs them a few cents and a percentage of the amount. If you are a "verified" user they have your bank account and can do elec- tronic debits from your bank account. You have to go through a much more complicated process to switch the funds transfer to happen using a credit card instead of electronically withdrawing the funds immediately from your bank account. This is bad because if you are not paying very close attention to every screen during a funds transfer, they will switch the source of the funds back to your bank account instead of from the credit card you were want- ing to use. This could cause you to bounce checks etc. if you are not closely monitoring your bank account balance and transactions. The reason they want to "verify" users is not for security or related reasons - it's so that they can try to dupe you into using your bank account instead of a credit card for sending money. The bank account usage gets them more float time (they get the funds on the same day usually, but can still hold it for several days) and a lower per-trans- action cost than processing credit card payments. They got me once and my wife once using this sleight-of-hand. We both pay very close attention now and we know to navigate through their tortuous path to switch the payment from bank account to credit card account. It is a non-trivial procedure, however, and in fact they have a big warning page about how much "safer" and "convenient" and so forth it is to use your bank account rather than your credit card for online payments. Notwithstanding that, the service that put PayPal on the map was the ability to e-mail someone money from your credit card. I have a number of other problems with PayPal in general but in my case I have not ever had a transaction fail to post or process prop- erly eventually. One time they took almost 2 weeks to let me have money that someone sent me and it would have been several days faster for the sender to snail-mail me a check. However, it eventually did go through, so I can't say that PayPal has ever ripped me off. The long delays they introduce would be fine, or at least I would not complain so much about them, if I didn't also have to pay a service or surcharge on each and every transaction now that I am a "verified" user. It was fine when all the transactions were free, but their charges are actually quite high especially given the lousy level of service and long delays they introduce into each transaction. The problem is more subtle than saying that they blatantly lie to all of their customers - what I'm saying is they misrepresent their services with the angle of minimizing their cost even though it makes it more difficult and expensive to do things "your way" by default. Their customer service is less than good. Also, your question or complain has a maximum of something like 500 characters so if you have a complicated question or problem or issue with their service there is not enough space to make your point. For me anyway. They do generally respond to comments or complaints but they have never taken action to make the thing I was complaining about go away. I still use PayPal because there is no other way I can accept credit card payments. For everything else it is faster & cheaper for the person to snail-mail me a check or money order. I think you'll find the same thing if you use PayPal. I hope this explains things. JimO ACH == Automated Clearing House, the US Federal Reserve's interbank electronic funds transfer system. I believe ACH transactions are processed in batches twice per day or perhaps more often by the Fed. Direct Deposit payroll processing is all done by ACH, for instance. EFT == electronic funds transfer of course. -- Jim Ockers (ockers@ockers.net) Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/ Fight Spam! Join CAUCE (Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email) at http://www.cauce.org/ .