An Open Letter to PayPal - Or How PayPal is Stopping Me from Lodging My Tax

https://plus.google.com/u/0/112726038360301567381/posts/94ApseNCASN

by MatCarpenter • 14 years ago

20 15 14 years ago

plus.google.com

squadron2• 14 years ago

For me to read this article I have to sign up for a Google plus account. No go. I'm trying to reduce my daily social media intake, thankyouverymuch.

Just keep in mind if you post on Google plus and no where else, you are limiting your audience. I, for one, will not read it.

chapel• 14 years ago

I am not sure what you are trying to say. There is no requirement for you to sign up for a Google+ account, or a Google account whatsoever.

A lot of people post very informative and provocative things on Google+, it is a shame that people would shun them just because it is on Google+.

gwillen• 14 years ago

Reading public Google+ posts on a mobile device doesn't work without a Google+ account. Try it.

GoodIntentions• 14 years ago

I read it ok...

I don't have a google+ account and have a browser that is pretty much locked down. ( no-script + ad-block + request policy ) Other than allowing google.com in no-script, no action required.

Short read, no surprises. - paypal customer has problem, can't get any customer service. There really needs to be some effective competition to PP before these stories stop, I think.

Maxious• 14 years ago

I can even read the content with curl. No javascript or cookies required.

squadron2• 14 years ago

Reading it on an iPhone and it's not allowing me access to the article.

dangrossman3• 14 years ago

If e-mail wasn't getting him anywhere, why hasn't he picked up the phone and called? My experience has been that the people on the phone were more knowledgeable and had more power to work on an account than the people responding to e-mails. And you don't have to wait.

citricsquid• 14 years ago

This is so true. Also, I'm not a high level Paypal customer, I have maybe a few thousand every year going through my account and they gave me a "valuable customer" number. I can quite literally dial the number and have a (native English speaking) representative on the other end within 15 seconds. How has he not just called?

petercooper• 14 years ago

As a PayPal user, I find this sort of issue more alarming than the usual temporary hold stories :-( That said, there should always be a second set of backup data for transactions you process.

You can lean on the receipts and transaction data stored by your chosen shopping cart or similar system. Even if the taxman won't accept these stats as authoritative, they're a good placeholder.

If everything is done with Buy Now buttons, though, things get a lot more difficult as the only remaining transactional record are the e-mails PayPal sends you which will be pretty tricky to collate.

Darren should also look into PayPal's various APIs (sadly there are so many..) though, as there's probably a way to slurp the transactional data one by one but programatically.

jvdh2• 14 years ago

The business of PayPal is to allow you to accept payments over the internet at a reasonable rate.

The business of PayPal is not to outsource your financial administration. If you run a million dollar business and you're relying on PayPal to keep the records for your tax, you're doing something wrong.

dangrossman3• 14 years ago

You cannot produce accurate records without PayPal's reporting, as there is no other way to know what exchange rate was used on a particular transaction, what fees were assessed, what chargeback and dispute fees and reversals occurred, etc.

jvdh2• 14 years ago

I assume you're doing business, selling goods or some kind of service. I do hope that you check beforehand whether someone pays for their goods/services before you give it to them right? At which point you have an accurate record for that client?

thinkcomp• 14 years ago

Every time I see a PayPal horror story, I think, "if only these people were to write to their representatives in Congress about the laws that allow PayPal and the banks to main their monopoly, something might actually happen." PayPal isn't going to change.

There's a mobile payments hearing in Congress on March 22nd. (See http://financialservices.house.gov/Calendar/EventSingle.aspx...). The witness list is closed and my guess is that no startup is represented. If you're interested in making your views known, e-mail me and I'll get you in touch with the right people.

nmridul• 14 years ago

When I read it again.

He contacts paypal support from another email id associated with a different paypal account. Paypal support sends him the report for that account and closes his ticket.

While there is no question that paypal has to get its things in order (able to generate the report correctly), but I think the blogger was also responsible for part of the confusion.

An Open Letter to PayPal - Or How PayPal is Stopping Me from Lodging My Tax

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