The comments in this remind me of a forum thread I found about a car product I was researching for the safety. Rhino Ramps. They are an alternative to using a jack to lift your car to work under it. The guy had the ramps collapse, and damage his truck.

The comments were filled with people thanking him for the notification, and were glad to know the ramps were faulty, before they had a set break while they were under and got crushed by the car when it fell.

Two things caught my attention. One, I couldn’t find a single other reference ANYWHERE to a problem with the ramps, and this guy had broken TWO pairs of them.

And yet, people were saying thanks to him for saving their lives. One guy said he had been using them for six years, and was going to get rid of his. Six successful years of usage, and yet the one guy on the planet that breaks them – probably from misuse – is cause to abandon his trusted ramps.

I’m hearing the same thing, here. “Thanks for the warning, I won’t use Paypal ever again, what should I use?” The answer is – keep using Paypal. I’ve been using Paypal for better than 13 years. I’ve had hiccups, but the service has never been a problem, except when they locked my account to protect against suspicious activity. Irritating, but not a reason to throw them to the fire.

Paypal isn’t the culprit in this scenario. The scumbag client is. He could have done the same thing with checks. Or credit cards. You – the author – even stated that you had a pre-cursor warning that he was a bad client. You can’t blame that on Paypal. You had an idea he was a problem before you even started – and you were right.

Paypal hardly has a monopoly. There are a multitude of options for the exchange of money for goods and services – including cash. Paypal is quick and convenient. People use it, and trust it. Yes, I’m sure there is a paypalsucks website. There’s one for every big business in America. With tons of horror stories, I’m sure.

But how many successful transactions did you have apart from this one bad one? Dozens? Hundreds? I’m sure I’ve had several thousand transactions with my account, in and out, over the course of more than a dozen years. If someone made a paypalrules website, and everyone posted their successful transactions, instead of the individual bad ones, that site would be far larger than the complaint site.

It’s a nice story, and yes – we need to watch out for bad CLIENTS. But I think it’s pretty shoddy “reporting” for a site like freelanceswitch to post. Especially considering Paypal is one of only two options Envato (parent company of this blog) allows for buying premium access to their sites.

If Paypal is so horrible, and worthy of this witch hunt – why doesn’t Envato eliminate them as a payment option?

The same has happened with me also. I lost money two times. I do now know what to do and still using same paypal credit card method. If any one has some alternate method than let me know.

Thanks and Regards,
Manish

May be one possible (and international) option is to use elance.com or odesk.com?
even without their per-hour modes, if you use them and got paid. you got paid. period. customer can argue of course but if he agree to pay – it’s done.
of course odesk’s fee is 10% and elance is 8%….

you can file a DMCA compaint

It’s interesting to note that most professional companies sell licenses, not product.

Surely most of the “won’t work…ha ha” posters here will find something wrong with *any* solution unless it’s a pain pal. Makes you wonder.

There is a significant market created by companies now who hire people to post on forums and blogs, to say things which shunt the reader to the company. Facebook was recently caught doing that. There are others.

A key reason to never use Paypal: Disputes and refunds. Having personally been abused by Paypal stealing (yup, stealing) money refunded to me in overpayment from a vendor with no recourse, I stopped using Paypal. Further, should there be any kind of dispute with a vendor, Paypal has horrible dispute resolution compared to say, Discover. I would never recommend using paypal; they are the total amateur hour when compared to a credit card company.

Ped’s right on that point.

As I’ve long advised, it’s best to have buyers do a direct wire transfer or check with the proper delays for bank certification. For those people who say “oh, I couldn’t possibly do that….it takes too long and I sell too much!” then fine, they can afford to build in a theft loss factor to their profit model.