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PayPal has been annoying some of its customers for years.
Instead of making it easy for folks to pay online using their credit cards, the digital payments company directs them to buy stuff with their PayPal balances and checking accounts. The end result has been both profitable for PayPal (because it avoids credit card networks' higher fees) and a pain for shoppers looking to rack up points or frequent flyer miles.
PayPal is finally changing that, thanks to new deals with Visa and Mastercard it signed earlier this year. On Thursday, PayPal took the chance to tout those agreements, saying its US customers will be able set a default way to pay -- whether credit card, debit card or bank account -- starting this month. The change will be implemented globally beginning early next year.
"We want to make it easy for anyone to pay however they want, wherever they want," Joanna Lambert, a PayPal executive focused on consumer products, said in an interview.
This change is another way PayPal is hoping to make its app and website far more intimate pieces of people's financial lives. Right now, PayPal is something its average customer uses only twice a month; it wants that to increase to twice a week. The Visa and Mastercard agreements could help do that by encouraging more people to use PayPal more often and inviting back many customers who were turned off by its current system.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Nuke on Saturday September 17 2016, @10:10AM
(Score: 3, Touché) by ledow on Saturday September 17 2016, @11:43AM
But... you're using both Paypal and the credit card company's services. There's a vast amount of infrastructure there. You're paying to use it. Surely that's... just fair, right?
And you already were able to do this anyway - I've religiously selected my card first on every Paypal transaction I've ever done. Why? Because it's not a credit card, and is in fact linked to my bank account. And Paypal has a stupid policy of first trying the bank account, and then if that fails trying to card. That's just going to give me extra transaction fees if that ever fails, because if one fails so will the other and my bank would charge for failed transactions on both.
So I've switched it every single time for all the time I've had my Paypal account (and, yes, I need my bank account on there too or you can't use it as a Paypal sellers-level account).
Nobody is forcing websites to offer Paypal only. They could take credit cards direct. You can do it with free smartphone dongles and things with various services. But I guarantee you that most large and small websites offer Paypal because it's cheaper than running their own credit card payments direct. Hence you're not paying the fees you would have anyway.
I don't really see the problem.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 17 2016, @12:12PM
Paypal is Big Brother. Let Big Brother know you buy boring stuff like, but for anything interesting, use cash.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday September 18 2016, @06:19AM
Note also that Paypal, probably the most-phished site on the planet, recently removed two-factor auth because, hey, no-one would ever think of targeting a Paypal account.
Yeah, no thanks guys, I'm sticking to a system that actually cares about keeping my payments safe.