Sunday, June 4, 2017

PayPal has given up on buyer protection

When PayPal started, it was clear that buyers were 100% protected no matter what happened, and I loved it.

Unfortunately, some less scrupulous people started abusing that system to scam sellers out of their products.

And so, PayPal attempted to stop screwing sellers over by adopting new policies.

The result of which is very simple: there is no buyer protection anymore.
Instead, PayPal guarantees to unscrupulous sellers that as long as they have a proof of delivery, it doesn't even matter what they ship, they'll keep the money.


Now, when someone on ebay sends you the wrong item or even just random crap, PayPal insists that you take your personal time and money to return the item to the seller before any refund takes place.

That seems to make sense, until you try to apply it to all these really cheap items we tend to use ebay for, like $1-20 items, that may come from Hong Kong, or another country, and generally cannot be shipped back for less than half the price of the item.

Add to that the time that it takes to properly repackage the item and then drop it off at the post office, and the customer is basically screwed in every case.

In other words, there is no real buyer protection anymore and people should probably stop using PayPal for any small transactions, given their support of scammers.


I guess full buyer protection was too good to be true, it's sad to see PayPal give up on that though.  I guess I'll use amazon more and more, until they too decide that customers should accept being screwed over by sellers.