PayPal Customer Service
Tags: Transparency Report, Trust, Paypal Customer Service, PayPal

Trustalyze is all about trust and transparency so I had to write this post on what PayPal and PayPal Customer Service has become lately. This post is designed to educate you so that you can make a better decision on whether to use PayPal or not.

More Customer Fees

I’ve used PayPal for a long time and over the last year or so their fees have become more aggressive. Case in point. If you receive a payment from a customer and that customer is not happy then when you decide to refund them, PayPal will charge you a fee to refund them. Here’s where it gets even more aggressive. If you receive a payment from a customer for say $500 dollars, that $500 is now sitting in your PayPal balance. When you try to issue a refund to customer, they won’t let you. Why? Because they charge a .30 cent refund fee so you need more money in your balance to issue that refund. If you have a bank account connected to your PayPal, they will reach into your checking account and pull out the $500 dollars. And to add insult to injury, if PayPal’s bot doesn’t like your site they will shut you down and keep that $500 in the account for 6 months where you can’t touch it. You can’t call them or fight it. You’re screwed out of that $500 dollars for 6 months. Why do they do this? Not sure but one could speculate that their doing this to earn interest off your balance once they ban your account.

Along with the above refund fees, they have a new “Inactivity Fee”. If you have $10 dollars in your PayPal account and you don’t login and use your PayPal account for 1 year, they will take that $10 dollars from you as an “Inactivity Fee”.

These are just a couple of their fees. They also have fees for doing just about anything else. Instant transfers, sending to friends, sending to family, international fees, reader fees and more. They are nickel and diming their customers with more fees. Lets not even talk about what they are doing with cryptocurrency fees. They are no better than a bank.

If you want to send money to friends and family then I recommend using other services. CoinBase is good for sending crypto to others. It’s cheap and they don’t tack on tons of fees.

No Customer Service

Say your account gets banned or you have questions about a purchase, well, good luck getting someone. It’s now next to impossible to talk to a human. Everything is now handled by bots. They do have a phone number but 100% of the time calling that number results in telling you they can’t help you and to go online.

There is an email support but only accessible after you spend days jumping through bot hoops and guess what? It’s outsourced to India. This is supposedly a American company yet they are using overseas cheap labor and assessing higher fees to you. This in turn makes them extremely profitable.

Reaching Into Your Bank Account

As I stated above, if you link a bank account to your PayPal account, they will reach into it and take funds without you knowing. Sure, they rely on their terms and conditions but who actually reads this legal mumbo jumbo? Who can actually understand it all? That’s how they get you.

If they reach into your bank account and grab the funds, you have no recourse unless your bank is really good at getting the funds back but most are in the pocket of PayPal and to me it seems that PayPal has told banks that if they don’t side with them then they can’t be used. Now I can’t prove this and it’s my opinion but it surely seems like this is the case.

Siding With Buyers

PayPal has changed their policy yet again where they seem to be siding with buyers most of the time. If you sell a digital product then you can’t send proof that the customer purchased the digital product and then you’ve just lost that purchase and guess what? More fees to ensue.

If you sell a product to someone and you shipped it to the customer and the customer claims they didn’t get it, guess what? You lose that purchase and the product.

What Can You Do?

First off, avoid PayPal if you can. Secondly, don’t add your checking account to your PayPal account.

There are other options besides PayPal. If you’re a merchant and you sell products or services then here’s a list of other payment solutions you can use for your eCommerce website:

Stripe

ccBill

Authorize.net

2Checkout

Skrill

Google Pay

And more…

Because PayPal now works with cryptocurrency, you can avoid them because there’s a strong possibility that if they ban your account then you’ll lose your crypto. So if you want to buy/sell crypto or send it to others then here are a few choices to use instead of PayPal:

CoinBase

Gemini

Binance

Kraken

IDEX

And more…

In Closing

PayPal has become so big that you, the merchant, don’t matter to them. It’s all about how much they can take from you and they will take from you in the form of more fees or being banned. It might not happen today or next week but it can happen to you. So consider alternatives if you can.

It won’t be long before most of us are using cryptocurrency as the means to buy and sell products. It’s not mainstream yet but it’s coming. Why? Because in crypto you don’t get nickel and dimed to death. That’s why it was created. To cut down on fees and middlemen. If you send money to someone using PayPal, then they’re going to take a percentage of the money and an additional fee as their cut. With crypto, you pay a small fee which is not relevant to the size of the funds. You can send $1 dollar or $20,000 dollars for the same small fee and guess what? No middle man to gouge you. Funds go from you to the person you sent them to. Case closed.