If you're solely a customer, you're unlikely to ever have any real problems with Paypal. For vendors though they are the devil.

This is the other side of the phenomenon that was Apple’s relationship with mobile carriers. They put the people buying ahead of the people selling.

It’s the same with PayPal, really. They’re prioritizing the people buying stuff over the people selling stuff.

Credit cards too.

It seems like buyers prefer protection a lot more than sellers do. Or maybe sellers just don't have any power to decide, and have to go where the buyers are.

> It seems like buyers prefer protection a lot more than sellers do.

It's a consequence of the regulations on credit cards. The cardholder can reverse allegedly-fraudulent transactions. Paypal can't reasonably do something else while processing credit cards, so they don't.

It's quite stupid because you end up with customers who aren't even looking for credit, they're willing to prepay and are willing to trust the seller, they just want to transfer funds digitally. But they can't because the seller/card processor doesn't trust the buyer not to reverse the transaction and the regulations don't allow the buyer to abandon that right up front.

PayPal could at least offer the option for purchases funded entirely from existing funds in the buyer's account. That they don't suggests that protecting buyers is more valuable to them than protecting sellers.

Isn't that whata debit card does

Debit transactions have the same sort of protections.

The main difference between debit and credit is that if you're the victim of fraud with a debit card, money has been taken from your bank account and you have to fight to get it back. The fight is usually not very hard, but it takes some time. If it hits at the wrong moment you may have trouble buying food or paying rent on time, even though you'll get the money back before too long.

Or that the barrier to entry for competitors is too high. It's pretty difficult to replicate the synergy PayPal had with eBay, which drove the number of Paypal customers up so high, so quickly.

Like, they never blocked your account for logging in from abroad?

My first account is still in zombie state because it can't be closed without sending them scans of some papers I couldn't care less about sending (and didn't have them abroad). There was no money there so I simply opened another one, but still an annoyance.

same here, except you can't use the same paypal account for credit cards issued in different countries. but you just end up using two paypal accounts.