PayPal Reviews Complaints for PayPal

PayPal is one of the most common merchant accounts out there. They have several different pricing options and is very popular amongst the e-commerce field in particular. PayPal was founded in 2000 and quickly became popular thanks to the help of E-Bay, the popular auction website. By April of that year, more than 1,000,000 E-Bay auctions were using PayPal, easily overshadowing E-Bay’s original payment online payment system, Billpoint. It was not until last year that PayPal began offering its services offline and entered into the brick and mortar market.

PayPal is accredited with the Better Business Bureau and has an A+ rating with them. Over the past three years, PayPal has has 6,569 complaints filed against them with 2,367 closed within the past 12 months. Out of those 6,569 complaints, 1,438 of their customers felt the response they received was unsatisfactory. Well over 500 of those type of complaints were filed this year. The number of complaints filed against PayPal is incredibly high and is a good example of how the Better Business Bureau’s rating might not reflect the overall consumer consensus. In fact, complaints about PayPal are rampant, and have even spawned it’s own website, paypalsucks.com, which has received over 10 million views and has been featured on popular news sources like CBS and Reuters. It seems the most popular complaint by far is PayPal holding onto their clients’ funds when they consider the charge to be fraudulent. The problem is that a lot of these charges were not, and that they hold the funds for a longer amount of time than they need to, it’s not uncommon to hear of a six month hold.

PayPal has historically put most of their marketing efforts into the e-commerce field. They have advertised it as a fast and easy way for anyone to make a payment online. PayPal has not only marketed to merchants, but also to consumers advertising their platform as a fast and secure way to make an online payment. PayPal only recently ventured out of the e-commerce field and started offering offline options. PayPal introduced its’ mobile payment solution, PayPal Here, in March of 2012. PalPal Here is an attachment for the iPhone or Android devices that allows merchants to swipe credit cards. This new product puts them in direct competition with SquareUp and Intuit GoPayment which are the two current frontrunners in the mobile processing field.

PayPal has several options when it comes to the pricing structure of a merchant account. For their new PayPal Here, they charge a flat 2.7% on all swiped transactions, with a free card reader. If the card is keyed in, it’s 3.5% and $0.15. For e-commerce merchants, a 2.9% and $0.30 transaction fee is applied for business whose monthly volume is less than $3,000. If the volume is between $3,001 and $10,000, the transaction fee is 2.5% and $0.30, over $10,000 is 2.2% and $0.30.