Years ago PayPal was one of my favorite tools . He used it for practically all the payments he made and also to receive money. But today the service has sunk lower and lower to a point where I no longer use it. Some time ago I took out all the balance I had and said goodbye to what was one of the leading apps for online payments. Why have I done it?
PayPal is, today, just a reflection of what it was in the past. And the funny thing is that the service worked better even when Elon Musk was in charge of it more than 20 years ago. The company was then acquired by eBay and also enjoyed a great period of success . But times change. I am not going back to PayPal and these are the reasons why I am determined not to.
high commissions
The commissions, of course, have always been there. But, in recent years, the insanity has increased dramatically until it has become an unsustainable problem . Commissions are applied to almost everything at a higher or lower level, even when you donate to organizations or causes that are recognized worldwide. There are also, of course, fees to send money to other users, to pay for services or to get paid for them. PayPal makes cash in all directions and has raised fees so much that the global profits they should get from it are in the millions.
Even though a series of maximum commission amounts have been established, such as a cap of 10 euros when you withdraw from your account to your bank account, it is still a headache . The only way to avoid these commissions, and it is not something that applies to all cases, is by making large withdrawals. But in those cases, be careful, because later I will tell you about another of PayPal’s problems. Finishing with the rates, take note of how there are amounts that vary greatly if there are currency changes, if you are charging a service or any other parameter that will influence what you have to pay.
poor compatibility
As I told you before, in the past the PayPal logo was everywhere . It was frequent that it was a very flexible payment option that you could use in practically the majority of web pages and services that you could access online. We used it in small online stores, in larger businesses, to pay for digital subscriptions and make international payments. If you had to buy something on a website in another country, PayPal was always the method you used.
And, no less relevant, if you were going to use eBay, the payment or collection was always with PayPal . It made sense, since eBay owned PayPal, why would they use another tool? However, for mysterious reasons, in 2015 eBay decided to separate from the financial service. That would mark the beginning of the end, a critical period in which PayPal would lose support and allies. Over the years came eBay’s decision to remove PayPal from its platform even with many complaints it had received from the community. And that made PayPal even less useful. Add to that that it cannot be used on Amazon either. What hope can you have?
bad customer support
When you use a financial service like this, what you want is to be treated well and get the help you need as quickly as possible. But that ‘s not something PayPal does exactly . In reality, the customer service it provides leaves a lot to be desired. Customer support is neither as friendly as you might imagine nor as efficient.
One of the problems of this customer service is the way in which incidents are resolved . There are all kinds of cases and contexts, and it would be impossible to mention them all. One of the ones that I can tell you about more closely is how there are some operations that, if they are too high, but within reasonable limits, PayPal can paralyze the movement of money until it deems appropriate. At that moment, a document verification process begins that can take weeks and even months. The facility provided is reduced and even if you are not committing any type of problem or illegality, the most common thing is to have to wait much longer than desired until your money is unlocked.
Therefore, although there are advantages of what we said before sending large amounts to a bank account so as not to pay commissions, you can also encounter these problems. If some kind of alarm goes off in PayPal… be prepared to wait to have access to your funds.
bad for sellers
The only positive aspect of eBay having stopped working with PayPal to adopt Payoneer, although this service is just as room for improvement, is that sellers will no longer be exposed to being scammed so frequently. After all, one of PayPal’s problems for years has been that the entity used to opt for solving incidents, giving more favorable results to customers than to sellers. And there were people who took advantage of this to get free shopping.
They would order things, file a claim saying that they had not arrived (if the shipments were not certified) or they would invent that the products were broken, and then PayPal had to return the money . That money, except in cases of seller protection, ended up deducting from the users’ account and, at the same time, they were left without the product they had sold. This is still happening, since PayPal is still a widely used payment method by sellers of other sales applications or online stores.
Other problems
Although PayPal has recently improved the way it provides cryptocurrency services and is no longer as terrible as it was originally, it is still below what could be expected from a financial institution with as much muscle as this one. Thus, today it is possible to send the cryptocurrencies that you have in mind to other digital wallets and use them in the way that you think is appropriate. You can send cryptocurrencies to a friend if you wish unless you have a negative account balance. But you won’t be able, for example, to comfortably send cryptocurrencies directly to your bank account. To do this you will have to continue using other services, which makes transferring your Bitcoin to PayPal less sense.
In addition, PayPal is a platform that has become obsolete. Both the interface and the operation in general, the security measures or the complementary services, it is noticeable that they have remained anchored in the past. The only positive thing the entity did was the acquisition of Xoom, which increased, at least, its options. But today, I will not use your service again.
