They've been abysmal and borderline criminal since the start.
They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve.
Why would you keep any money on PayPal. It’s just a pass-through to your bank account, accepting payments without giving your bank details to strangers on the internet.
Once you start doing frequent business through PayPal, they begin 'holding' some of your money to form a buffer against chargebacks and fraud. This doesn't happen often at the consumer level, but dominates within the small business world.
PayPal isn't a bank. They're a processor. People run afoul when they keep large amounts in their processor account instead of doing free nightly sweeps. They also run into trouble when they do weird things - like new accounts receiving large funds from international sources, etc. PayPal (and all processors) are required to investigate those instances until you have an established relationship with them - and they'll temporarily hold the suspicious funds while that happens. Business accounts have predictable, established patterns.
99% of the horror stories you hear fall into one of these categories, or both: 1) New Account 2) Unusual Account Activity
PayPal processed millions in annual payments for my previous company, without any issues.
> They randomly withheld £20k from a business I was involved with for no stated reason and no direct means to talk to a human about it. It took months to resolve.
If only there was a regulatory framework to turn that into an extremely simple court case, and to also punish attempts of PayPal to ban users who stand up for access to their money.
If they’re a near-monopoly they shouldn’t be allowed to set their own rules.
Exactly treating companies with huge market shares more like utilities that can't just refuse to do business with people for arbitrary reasons and have to follow due process would provide a natural pushback against monopoly building - much more effective than antitrust litigation could ever be.
It's always funny when people say these big companies can't provide a good service because that "wouldn't scale" as if their ability to scale is a god given right and not something that should be pushed back on itself.
