Keep in mind that unhappy customers tend to write angry reviews, and happy customers don’t write anything. Credit card fraud is a big problem. Lots of web sites are shady, borderline illegal, not PCI compliant, and the owners are not familiar with credit card processing procedures like chargebacks and holds. Thus some of the bad reviews, which are really saying “I didn’t understand how this works before I signed up.”

I have worked on and managed a lot of e-commerce sites. If you can open a merchant account with a bank (which is not necessarily easy) you can use any number of processors. Braintree is the one several of my clients use. PayPal owns Braintree but it works separately from PayPal’s credit card offerings.

If you don’t have a merchant bank account you have to use an intermediary like Stripe or PayPal. They use their own merchant account and charge higher fees. I’ve used both and find them about the same, though I think Stripe integration with a web site is a bit simpler. Most of my clients use Stripe and none of them has had serious issues. When I’ve had support issues I got them resolved quickly, though it seems like PayPal has more bureaucracy.

Sure but on the same token lot of startup processing companies are still learning the ropes and themselves appear to be shady, borderline illegal etc. Slack is one of them.

Not every terrible review is from owners who are not familiar with credit card processing procedures. Especially considering Slack is fairly new and already has 1000s of terrible reviews.

Anyway, I am familiar with how merchant accounts and the intermediaries work.

Thanks for recommending Braintree, they are already on my list.

I've been using PayPal for 20 years for apps users pay a yearly fee for and never had a problem with them. The prices of the apps range from $30 to $50 a year so they're not a big ticket item and if a user requests a refund I issue it right away, even if they pass the "30 Day Refund" period I offer.

Most all the complaints I've seen about PayPal have to do with someone selling a pricey item and the buyer claims it did not meet their expectations. In those cases PayPal seems to side with the buyer and refunds their money, and that makes sense. They shouldn't be expected to arbitrate those issues because they are not in that business and have no legal authority to do so (as far as I know).

I honestly don't know what PayPal's legal obligations are in cases like that but it's clear they don't want to be in the business of enabling the defrauding of people.

In my case, PayPal has never been a problem for me.

Stripe

uh no

https://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/stripe.com

LOL most of those read like scammers who got caught in delayed fraud review.

The way it works at most payment processors: since an awful lot of people churn / decide to do something else / don't sell anything, they'll let most anybody sign up and start integrating, accept a few payments, and THEN have a human do the detailed account review.

This avoids wasting time reviewing accounts that won't ever process a payment - but it also produces irate fraudsters, who went to all the trouble of integrating only to have all their payments reversed to the customers.

Do you work for Stripe?

Startups Fintech companies are notorious for still trying to figure out the game.

Stripe is no different. They have terrible reviews all across the internet. Not all of them are "scammers" as you like to call them.