Not to be outdone by startup company Square, Inc.’s popular credit card processing service for the masses, PayPal introduces PayPal Here. The new service, announced just last week, reports over 1,000 new signups per hour. Unlike Square’s service, which requires a plastic cube-shaped dongle to swipe credit cards through (with an option of manually keying in a card number, but with a higher accompanying transaction fee), PayPal allows using a smartphone’s camera to photograph credit cards or personal checks, as well as using their card reader device.
PayPal also advertises a fee of 2.7 percent on PayPal Here transactions, slightly lower than Square’s 2.75 percent fee. The service is currently available to approved merchants in the United States, Canada, Australia, and Hong Kong.
Personally, I’ve long viewed PayPal as a necessary evil in today’s digital economy. They’ve established themselves as a legitimate form of payment over the years and made it easy for many people to set up web-based stores with shopping carts. But on the downside, they’ve managed to skirt government regulations imposed on other financial institutions with their claim that they’re simply a digital wallet — not a bank. Meanwhile, their internal dispute resolution policies remain the subject of many complaints, including their tendency to freeze a user’s funds for as long as six months at a time, while claiming fraud investigations. (I went through this myself once, simply because I purchased an item from a seller who became a subject of one of their investigations. Hundreds of dollars were trapped in my PayPal account, inaccessible for several months.) Since their merger with eBay, they’ve become the only allowable form of payment for their auctions, which appears to ensure them a captive audience of users, despite a dislike of their policies. Therefore, I’ll stick with Square, Inc. for the majority of my small business’s credit card transactions. For now, PayPal Here can stay over there.
PayFiend is more like it.
When interest rates were higher a few years ago, I accidentally left money in my Paypal account from a large ebay sale. A few months later, I went to go pay for something else, only to find that I had earned nearly $10 in interest by leaving my money in there (it was returning nearly 5% as a money market). I know people have beef with Paypal’s policies, but honestly I’ve been very happy with them, and use it almost daily.
If this works as well as Square, and charges less commission, I might bite.
The shape of it reminds me of the Sabre tablet on The Office. Haha.