[Arm-netbook] Paypal sabotage crowdfunding

[Paul Boddie]

On Sunday 6. December 2015 19.53.51 Philip Hands wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 
> Since this list has people that are reasonably likely to come up with
> crowdfunding projects, I thought I'd point at this sorry state of
> affairs, caused by Paypal:
> 
>   http://neo900.org/news/paypal-trouble-delays-project
> 
> (the link to http://garethhayes.net/paypal-warning/ is hardly
> encouraging either)

I have been somewhat aware of this situation - the Neo900 one, not the 
Australian one - and I can only say that it is most unfortunate.

PayPal has a poor-enough reputation that I refuse to use their service at all: 
I've seen people struggle with getting an account enabled to be able to pay 
people fairly urgently, seeing them go round and round in the stupid card-
sampling verification loop to no avail; it used to be possible to pay random 
merchants by card via PayPal, but now they appear to want you to create an 
account to do so, and even with an account in the bag, a simple transaction 
becomes something that Kafka wrote up. I've even read reports of jurisdiction-
surfing (moving Swiss accounts to Singapore, if I remember correctly), and it 
wouldn't surprise me if their European residence is in the most leniently-
regulated venue that can still offer services to people in the EU.

The last time I was confronted with the option to pay by PayPal, I had a nice 
chat with the merchant (Fritzing Fab) and we agreed on a bank transfer 
instead, to everybody's satisfaction. Merchants/vendors feel that they need to 
offer convenient ways of paying for things. Sadly, there are people for whom 
PayPal has caused no problems who see fit on insisting on using the service 
for payment. As Werner writes...

"However, after many supporters asked for a means to pay by credit card, due 
to wire transfers being difficult and expensive for them, we looked for a way 
to accommodate these wishes."

Now, it may be the case that some people would otherwise have to use archaic 
banking systems that don't offer decently-priced transfers to Europe (or 
within Europe if we're thinking of UK banks). However, convenience may have 
been king for some people for whom PayPal is easiest but where other options 
would still have been easy. I would encourage people to reconsider their 
preference for PayPal even if it causes them slightly more inconvenience and 
slightly more cost, because the result (as we see here) is neither more 
convenient nor less costly.

Not that anyone really needs to be told this (or maybe thinks that they need 
to be told this), but anyway.

Paul