Recent articles about eBay’s strategy shift, such as this one, underline that eBay will be trying to grow its payments business, PayPal, as auctions decline and the growth in ecommerce in general slows down.
But after reading this string of comments, in response to a fairly innocuous blog post by Fred Wilson (”Why Isn’t PayPal More Successful?“), I wouldn’t put a dime into a company that wants to grow this thing without overhauling its approach to business and customer service. Some snippets:
I smell a scam every time I have to deal with them these days.
I’ve had a $3000 payment held up for months as they suspect that the funds were fraudulently taken from my account. It took me a month before they would even let me prove that I indented to pay for that item on eBay. Needless to say the seller was pissed.
I would seriously (seriously!) hit my fingers with a framing hammer before I would use Paypal again. I don’t have emotional reactions to most brands. Apple? Eh. Windows? Sort of dislike it. Amazon? Sort of like it. … Paypal? HATE HATE HATE HATE HATE.
Also, Paypal’s buyer protection is a complete joke. They claim to be able to help, but I lost all faith when I received this response from their resolution center after blatently getting ripped off by a web designer scammer: “After careful review, we have determined that the seller is at fault but regret to inform you that we were unable to recover any funds from the seller’s account.” How this reads to me: “You’re screwed and we tried to help for 7 seconds but then didn’t feel like helping anymore so we stopped.”
The biggest issue for me is that they demand bank account information to “verify” my credit card accounts once cumulative transactions go over a certain level. I have absolutely no interest in having my bank account numbers all over the place on different sites’ servers, and at the same time they have no need for the information as I always use an (obviously valid) credit card through them.
Ugh. I hate paypal.
I haven’t seen this much negative emotion around a product in quite some time. Good luck to eBay CEO John Donahoe. He’s going to need it.
UPDATE 26 May 09: Another ugly PayPal story, posted as a comment on the pennlive.com version of this blog.
