Paypal or Plastic?

[Riverkilt]

My preferred method is over a toll free line to a vendor with a credit card. Since many vendors don't offer toll free lines and I'm reluctant to pay business day rates for long distance, I use my credit card with Pay Pal.

As posted before, the kicker is that the vendor can't send me an Pay Pal invoice or Pay Pal raids my bank account without ever giving me the option to use my credit card. When I emailed them about this their response was they were too busy to respond to emails.

What I've worked out is the vendor telling me by email what the cost of my order will be. Then if I initiate the payment through Pay Pal I'm still getting the option to use my credit card to make payment.

I choose to use the credit card so I have some recourse if something goes wrong.

Ron

[brandycr]

had a paypal account for awhile but kept getting charges fro 2 to 7 dollars .Well if would of happened once no biggy but lost over 300 dollars in a week.Contacted them to see what was going on so it could be fixed and thier responce was obviously someone was using my account other than me.oh.....really no offers to refund money or any of that so i closed out paypal never touched it again use the credit card straight out

[neo71665]

Pay pal only for about 3 years with no hitch.

[GG]

I have nothing but bad experiences with Paypal. I once made up an account but despite the fact that I have never used it, I get hundreds of curious e-mails informing me about things I should have "ordered", new e-mail adresses that should have been connected to my account etc. I have given up telling which messages are false and which are from Paypal - if any.

I shall only deal with companies that accept credit cards.

GG

[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.

[herminator]

I use paypal exclusively as I don't have credit cards. Paypal I have set up to my bank account. Most online companies take paypal and when checking out in foreign funds it shows the conversion for me. I know how much to leave in the account for when thosefunds are taken out (usually takes a few days for some reason though). With the lack of a credit card I have been unable to purchase something online quite often.

Same here!

[Barclay]

If I have the option of using PayPal, I will. I love the security and protection that they offer and in several years of using them have never had a single problem. If only cards are accepted, I will pay by card, but usually a debit card so that I can monitor account activity online if I am dealing with a vendor that I have never worked with before, plus my bank offers a much higher level of fraud protection than does my credit card company.

[neo71665]

I grew up with most the girls that work at my bank and hang the x-mas lights at the joint so I get phone calls anytime something goes on with my account that doesn't look right.

[McMurdo]

I will mostly use paypal now as it is so much easier than any other method for me, I have it set to go through my visa, most everyone I have dealt with for online purchases has paypal, and I have not experienced any problems whatever with them so for the forseeable future I will be using paypal.