Paypal or Plastic?

[McClef]

I always forward suspected spoof emails about paypal or ebay to them for investigation and I always get an email back confirming if they were genuine or not. A really good clue is whether or not the email has your name in it or not.

Here in the UK the addresses are spoof@ebay.co.uk and spoof@paypal.co.uk - I expect for the US it would be .com instead.

[M. A. C. Newsome]

I know that PayPal first started getting a bad rap when the spam/fraud emails started getting really common posing as authentic PayPal email.

While PayPal actually had nothing to do with these phishing schemes, it didn't matter. The media picked up on it, and once people saw or heard a news story the words "PayPal" and "fraud" were linked in their minds. PayPal got a bad rap because of it.

We use PayPal to accept credit card payments through the museum's on line gift shop. Why? Because I didn't want to (couldn't afford to) hire a web professional to set us up with our own secure shopping cart system (and then pay that same web professional again every time I needed to add or remove an item, or change a price, etc.). With PayPal, they make the shopping cart system so easy even someone with only minimal web design experience can use it (me!) and the only cost is a percentage of the sale, which is comparable to the percentage you'd pay any credit card company.

I also like it because it gives our customers the option to use most all major credit cards (more than we can accept in the store), as well as their checking account (we get a lot of people doing that). Plus private financial information such as credit card numbers stay hidden. We never see that information.

Also PayPal has a dispute system that protects both the buyer and the seller. If the buyer initiates as dispute, that money is held until both sides can present information. I've had it happen a few times when a customer would initiate a dispute claiming never to have recieved the goods, and PayPal put a hold on those funds until we could provide a tracking number showing where the package was delivered and signed for. So PayPal was watching out for both parties.

Of course, at the museum, when you order you also have the option to just call us and give us your credit card number on the phone. If you do that, we can only take the cards we actually accept in the store (Visa, MC, AmEx). The up side is that you get to talk to a person and I can verify on the spot if the item you want is in stock or, if not, how long it will take to get. A lot of people just like talking to a person when they place the order, regardless of what on-line system you use.

Every now and then we have people mail in a check or money order payment, but that is actually rare.