Introduction
So, you’ve sold something online, you took payment via PayPal, and now something has gone wrong with that payment. You’re frustrated, confused, and you start searching online for information about what you’re experiencing. That’s when you stumble upon this interesting website, PayPalSucks.com.
You begin reading about other similar stories from other people and you quickly get a feeling of “ok, at least I’m not alone.” You begin to feel right at home in this community…and that’s exactly what they want.
Their Claim
The PayPalSucks.com home page pronounces themselves as a “consumer gripe site network”, and at least this much is true. They claim to be bringing together all of the people who have problems so they make a large voice and get something done.
They even have a 6 step process for how you can get involved and make your voice heard, which includes submitting your own story and providing a list of alternatives to PayPal. This is exactly where the manipulation and misdirection begin, though.
The Reality
When I browse through the stories on PayPalSucks.com, I simply see honest ignorance. In almost every instance, there is something that happened throughout the process in the story that could have been done differently to avoid the entire problem in the first place. With just a little bit of education these people could learn from whatever mistakes were made and could avoid similar problems in the future.
It’s unfortunate, but the PayPalSucks.com community does absolutely nothing to educate you about what happened or how to avoid it. They don’t care about helping you. All they want is for you to post your story about the problem you’re having so they can continue to feed this illusion that PayPal is the enemy, and then steer you into their list of alternative payment processors.
What You’re Missing and How They’re Feeding Off of YOU
Remember that everything PayPalSucks.com does is to lead you into their list of alternatives to PayPal. They provide a nice, long list of merchant account providers that you could sign up with and use instead of PayPal. What they don’t tell you is that they are affiliates with these providers, and they get commissions on every transaction you ever run through your account once you’ve signed up!
That’s right. Just like with many other products and services, you can easily sign up to be an affiliate and provide leads to service providers like merchant account providers. For every person you sign up you might get $50, or maybe even a small percentage of their volume over time, or any other number of incentives to get people signed up with new accounts.
When you’re in this business, the question becomes “how do I get people to sign up through my links and use my service providers over all the others out there?” Well, one spectacular way is to piggy back off a big name like PayPal.
PayPalSucks.com simply uses the PayPal name and high search volume online to snag you, and then boosts your negativity towards PayPal when you’ve run into a problem so that they can steer you towards “better” solutions and reap the benefits of signing you up for a new account.
Meanwhile, what they still haven’t educated you on is the fact that these alternative providers will still have the same exact issues if you don’t follow the same standards that PayPal recommends! They all follow the same standards, and they all have their own ways of managing risk through balance holds, high risk rates, or any of a wide variety of possibilities.
Conclusion
The most important point I can make here is that regardless of who you’re processing your payments with you need to familiarize yourself with the standard procedures of selling online as well as any unique procedures that a given merchant account provider may follow before you start selling.
Don’t let schemes like PayPalSucks leech off of you. Knowledge is power. Educate yourself and you’ll avoid these issues altogether.