FOB
Friends Of Bart
User loginCMS by Drupal |
It's Your Pal, But Who Pays?PayPal sounds like such a beautiful idea. A trusted third party to handle financial transactions, hooked into credit cards and ACH on one end, and providing account management services on the other… I just tried for the second time in the past few months to actually pay for something using PayPal. As usual, it didn't work. I tried all kinds of workarounds. Then I finally gave up. PayPal has been exempted from banking and S&L regulations (true), and there are stories about PayPal just taking folks' money (I can't vouch for these stories personally). All of that aside, it seems to me that if you're trying to sell something, you shouldn't use a service that won't accept payment from the customer. I can't imagine I'm the only one in this situation. I'm guessing Google Checkout does a better job.
|
Trying to be less lame than my last comment
Hmm... so many things to say, and all so banal :)
Good job with the disclosure, yes Mister Anony came to the wrong place if he thinks your opinion of a Google service wouldn't necessarily colored at least a little by the facts you just stated. I agree, you're not saying Checkout is definitely a far stronger offer... just mostly whining about PayPal.
I have no www.paypalwarning.com story to tell but they do make me nervous. Bart I'll see you tonite, if it would amuse perhaps we can see if you can send me cash through my secret PayPal link. It seems to work fine for others.
What are you selling? I can't wait to buy! ha ha
Shilling for Google
gets old really fast. Google makes broken products, just like everyone else. I've NEVER seen a Google Video - they always come up with the message "This video is not available right now, try again later." They don't even load.
PayPal is horribly designed and of marginal robustness. But let's not just assume that anything branded "Google" is the solution to our problem.
I've looked at Google Checkout a bit
It wasn't just an off-the-cuff remark, although it admittedly looked that way. I'm pretty sure I'm going to use Google Checkout for an upcoming bart-massey.com thing, so I examined the setup pretty carefully. It seems to me to be much more robust than PayPal.
While I'll agree that Google is not some kind of deity, in general I've found their stuff tends to work out of the box, to improve over time (one of the biggest problems with PayPal is that it seems to have completely stagnated), and to be designed to fill a real-world need rather than being a solution seeking a problem.
You must also understand that they've been very good to me, and to the open source community through me. Google's Summer of Code has supported 11 of my students for a Summer over the past two years. Google has also given me $100K to spend on open source activities(!). Even if I was shilling, I think they'd be entitled to a bit of shilling from me under the circumstances.