As a buyer, I think PayPal offers a great service - making it so so easy to get those latest gadgets I need, without even thinking about it, or having to dig out my credit card from wherever I put it...

As a seller, I'm not so sure.

Paypal advertise on their website that they Accept payments globally, safely and easily

Starting at the end, we have always found PayPal to be hard work to deal with - sending email to them is completely pointless - as you'll generally get back a reply something like this:

Dear ....,

 

Thank you for contacting us in relation to the status of your Buyer Complaint (XXagent to insert case IDXX). We can confirm that (XXagent to insert brief summaryXX).

 

It is my pleasure to assist you. Thank you for choosing PayPal.

 

Sincerely,

 

.....

- This has been copied word for word from the last email we recieved from PayPal - and was the 6th in a series of more and more non-sensical emails for this case. (One of the previous emails had advice which we presume related to somone elses case - it certainly wasn't relevant for ours!)

So as far as we are concerned, the easily claim is an outright lie.

Moving on then, we get to the safely claim.

PayPal offers NO protection to sellers of non physical products and services

What this means, is that unless you have shipped a physical item, to the PayPal confirmed registered address (using an approved tracked delivery service) then you have no protection at all against fraudulent transactions / charge backs.

So anyone that is providing an online service using PayPal for charging customers (and it really does cost money to provide these services) has no gurantee that they will actually recieved the funds from PayPal, even when PayPal has instructed them that the funds have been transferred...

So, more acurately, I think PayPal's strapline should be:

Accept payments globally, safely (for PayPal not you!) and with extreme difficulty!