Paypal is horrifyingly bad.
I had no idea just how much eBay really rips people off like Jimmy has iterated before until I really got going in the merchant world on Amazon, Craigslist and other places.
They are just very, very strict. Very bad. Paypal is one of the worst fake third party payment services around, sad as that is.
I enjoyed a certain kind of irony when I ended up taking payments by credit card anywhere, through actual merchant accounts from Google Checkout to Amazon Payments to others like 1co/1st data.
And I think after seeing how easy and much better it is I will definitely move most payments to 1st data or credit card. I want to be able to dispute charges, settle things myself, finish it myself.
Paypal allows none of that, they are a 'CRUTCH' and that's pretty much all they are and they are for auctioneers.
Paypal's fault it may not be, but I really think they are bad stuff as they advertise themselves as a 'merchant' even though they're a third party processor who charges fees for everything: Verbatim
When I was doing transactions off yahoo shopping cart I was enormously pissed off that Paypal decided to hold the transaction, even during just a routine refund or dispute it would get held! And then I realized its time to move away from Paypal completely now, that's a real good idea.
Do you know how much more freedom you get when you just stand out in the shopping directories, and have your merchant account on Google Checkout just process all the orders? And fight chargebacks? And have your own merchant ID for security?
Do you really know? It's the difference between a business, and someone pretending to be in business. Ultimately, because I HEAVILY favor merchants due to my sales success in Clickbank & affiliate products like People Search. They are merchant ONLY!
And this is ecommerce.