Re: The ins and outs of paypal.
It's simple in theory.
At least for a US account, you sign up for paypal with your name and address. You can't send money until you verify the information with either your bank account number (and access to your online/monthly bank statement) or a credit card (certain gift cc's can be used too, as long as you can check your balance online, and have a few dollars on the card).
It's a preferred method of online payment since the fees are low, it's instant, and unlike WU, everything's done online. If you have your bank account attached, you don't even have to wait for funds to be transferred onto your paypal balance - you can do that instantly as well.
Unfortunately, it's one of the more risky forms of payment to accept as a seller, since the lack of in-person verification allows for a fair amount of fraud. Paypal also offers buyer protection, so if a claim is made, they will nearly always side with the buyer. "Claim and cancel" is supposed to reduce the risk by using up the claim option and verifying the transaction went fine, but there is no foolproof way to stop a chargeback (especially if the payment was made through credit card, or was sent from a stolen paypal.)
Thus, other precautions include requiring bank-funded payments (which you can tell apart from cc payments by the lack of fees in the payment details), and phone verification to personally verify that you're speaking to the true holder of the paypal account. I don't know how effective these methods are (and needless to say, sellers have their own beliefs as to what the 'safest' method is) but there's always a risk. Hence why Sythe.org flat-out refuses paypal donations, regardless of how they're made.
Paypal is great for legitimate transactions - especially online purchases (since you don't have to give away your CC info), but if you intend to do any high-volume Sythe business, then you should have someone else explain paypal's process of limiting accounts for suspicious activity - all I know is it's a pain in the ass.
Last edited by Sin666 : 06-13-2010 at 05:31 PM.
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