Don’t use PayPal to accept credit cards, please!
December 29, 2005 by Dmitry
You know what? PayPal doesn’t accept payments from many countries. When you use PayPal’s system to accept credit cards, people from these countries just can’t pay.
For example, I’m in Russia. I can’t pay for, say, Flickr Pro account, since they accept payments via PayPal (even credit cards are processed by them), and PayPal doesn’t accept money from Russia. Or Mint (developer said that it’s not in his plans to accept payments without PayPal).
Now, everyone (BSA, RIAA) talks that there are tons of pirated software, music and videos in our country. Since I’m a software developer, I know – this is bad, bad. bad. But how the hell we are supposed to pay if you don’t want accept money from us?
I want, I REALLY WANT to buy music from Apple’s iTunes Music Store. Can I? No, they don’t accept my money. Same thing with music stores included in Windows Media Player – we have only one such store, which has only Russian pop music that suck.
Think! – Internet, Visa, Mastercard is all about going global. How are you supposed to go global if you restrict people from buying your stuff?
Think again! – there are tons of credit card processors that don’t exclude countries. Use them. Don’t use PayPal. Or use it as an option.
P.S. I accept PayPal. This is for your conveniece. I don’t want to exclude PayPal customers from purchasing my product. But since I can’t accept it directly (remember, I come from “bad” country), I use SWREG to process my PayPal payments.
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Its really actual topic. Ive always wondered what is the criterion that determines “bad” or “good” countries, and how to make our country a “good’ one, if we have no possibilities for legal use of license products.
I could not agree more! You are totally right. I just tried to download the Battlestar Galactica special from iTunes, but for that you need be registered with iTunes and for that you need to have a credit card or a PayPal account. So I just created one - my country just recently accepted by PayPal - but after registering my PayPal account with iTunes I was refused to download that free special. Ditto with my AMEX. This kind of sucks! Big time…
PayPal sucks big time. This is a problem with companies that hold a monopoly. No competition.
exactly..
if ever it protects us from scammers.. I certainly dont want to accept money from countries where their is a high rate of scammers.
As far as I can tell, MOST credit card processors don’t have problems with accepting my card. Banks accept my money too. The only problem is PayPal. See?
“Stop the jerks in your countries that participate in identity theft, credit card fraud, cell phone scams, etc and my bet is the banks will be begging you to do business with them.”
Are you suggesting me to get a gun and go kill them? Or what? What EXACTLY do you want ME to do?
Or, maybe we’ll gonna compare a number of jerks in your country and my country? Let’s found an award for the most shitty country? :)
Dmitry, please don’t take this personally, the problem is that a lot of organised criminal gangs involved in credit card fraud are based in Russia. # of jerks? Well unfortunately Russia is at the top of the list as one of the most fraudulent countries in the world. I have an online shopping site and my bank is quite happy to accept Russian shoppers. However, I have chosen to ban all Russian visitors from my site. Why? Because I spend all my time chasing criminals who try to rip me off, it was happening every single day… Actually I had nearly a THIRD of all my sales into Russia turning out to be scam gangs! So to accept Russian visitors was costing me money, not making me money. As for Bernt Meier’s comment, you think Paypal is a monopoly? hahahaha. Do a bit of research before forming your opinions. It’s very obvious to me you have no experience whatsoever, to be making such comments. Fix the organised crime problem in Russia, and fix the corruption of the police (and their total lack of international co-operation with Interpol), and then it might become profitable for more companies to accept Russian credit card orders. Meantime, its just a big headache that I choose to ignore by banning all Russians at my order page. I feel sorry for the 99.999% of Russians who are hard working honest people, but technologically, there is no other way for me to prevent my business being scammed, so I must ban all Russians from my site. That is the unfortunate reality a nasty few of your countrymen are causing for all Russians, so until Russia solves it’s gang problems its not going to get any better for online shopping anytime soon. (my bank gave me a discount for banning Russian orders as well…)
Brian: as far as I can tell, all scammers from Russia steal credit card numbers from US and other countries. They are not stupid enough to use their real address. For example, with RegSoft I’ve got a few chargebacks from Americans — when I looked into order details carefully, I found suspicions that these orders actually came from Russian scammers. But the country, of course, was US. So if you sell digital products (that don’t have to be delivered physically), countries just doesn’t make sense, since scammers can use any other country (and, for example, use proxies to hide their IPs).
Paypal is horrible.They are just as bad as the scammers you are talking about.They can freeze your money at anytime.They can also hold your money for up to 6 months.There have been alot of lawsuits files against them.You are much better off with just a merchant account.
You are lucky that you can not use Pay pal. They take your money w/o reason and because they are a monopoly they have that power. NEVER use pay pal!!!