Go Away PayPal

by la_pas • 13 years ago

76 44 13 years ago

edandersen• 13 years ago

It's not clear in the article - is PayPal gaming the "Important Inbox" feature of Gmail by making fake important-reading "Balance Summaries"?

xelfer• 13 years ago

Pretty much. An email I received 30 minutes ago:

"xelfer, your PayPal balance summary is here plus an extra discount from Virgin Airlines."

josteink• 13 years ago

What a shock!

When Gmail introduced a feature to reduce spam and spam-like email in your Inbox, the people sending that spam will adapt and try to game it. More news at eleven.

Did anyone seriously believe this would be a viable long term solution?

wpietri6• 13 years ago

The shock expressed isn't about Gmail; it's Paypal. Bottom-feeding behavior from Viagra spammers is expected. But from valuable tech brands it's a sign of dangerous rot.

casca• 13 years ago

TL;DR: OP received marketing email from Paypal and is angry

wpietri6• 13 years ago

It goes deeper than that. He's specifically angry at the high bullshit level in the email, and has some reasonable speculation as to why PayPal is doing something harmful to their brand.

Marketing isn't synonymous with jerkiness. Google, for example, had a great touch with marketing for many years. AWS still does. In both cases I mainly heard from them when they had created something new and probably valuable to me personally.

Here, though, PayPal isn't sending these emails because they are creating value for you. They're sending them because they're using you to generate income. You aren't the customer; you're the veal cow, the foie gras goose.

3825• 13 years ago

Some context I didn't know before:

The production of foie gras (the liver of a duck or a goose that has been specially fattened) involves the controversial force-feeding of birds with more food than they would eat in the wild, and more than they would voluntarily eat domestically. The feed, usually corn boiled with fat (to facilitate ingestion), deposits large amounts of fat in the liver, thereby producing the buttery consistency sought by some gastronomes.

Animal welfare controversy aside, I would imagine this suggests they are prematurely exploiting their user base in a non-sustainable manner. If only the customers (I assume the shareholders are their customers?) would care that this tarnishes the brand in the long run.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foie_gras_controversy

blumkvist2• 13 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

NKCSS• 13 years ago

Even the google cache doesn't load here.

petercooper• 13 years ago

Click on the "Plain text version". Google's cache has a really bizarre flaw where it still loads certain assets from the original site and if they block the rendering, things still don't appear.

linker3000• 13 years ago

Like the one I received from British Telecom a few years back that went something like...

We noticed that in the past you opted not to receive marketing emails from us, but we're contacting you now to confirm whether this is still the case because we'd hate to think you're missing out on the following type of offers when you really wanted to see them...

[Insert unwanted marketing crap here]

enneff• 13 years ago

In Australia they passed legislation to prevent banks from offering unsolicited credit increases. Now I regularly receive mail saying "We're not allowed to offer you credit increases unless you ask us to. Do you want to opt in?" What a joke.

Ashuu• 13 years ago

Going through HN effect.

kintamanimatt6• 13 years ago

Two and a half options:

1. Click the unsubscribe link

2. Click the spam button

2.5. Sue them if they're breaking any local anti-spam laws. It's quite obvious that the spirit of the email wasn't to deliver account information if it was otherwise laden with promotional content. Chances are any judge or magistrate would look right through the account update BS to see the true nature of the content.

blumkvist2• 13 years ago

Only federal agencies and possibly ISPs can use the CANSPAM as a basis for a lawsuit. Private individuals can't.

kintamanimatt6• 13 years ago

This is to Australian customer from PayPal Australia Pty Limited. The CANSPAM Act doesn't apply there as it's a US law.

Australia has the Spam Act 2003 but I don't know anything about it.

ataggart4• 13 years ago

Violence is not an appropriate response. The first two are sufficient.

kintamanimatt6• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what you mean. Suing someone isn't an act of violence.

tbrownaw• 13 years ago

The existence of those laws says that society has decided that yes it is appropriate (largely because nothing else seems to work, I think).

asimove• 13 years ago

Didn't know anyone could try this hard to get a post on HN.

kintamanimatt6• 13 years ago

You could have said anything. Why this?

imurray• 13 years ago

I closed my paypal account last week due to receiving "transaction summary alerts" when I had no transactions. It seemed the only way to unsubscribe was to not be alerted of any real transactions.

Spammy behaviour -> lost customer. If enough people walk with their feet, their analytics should quickly give them the message.

macbig273• 13 years ago

Well, the only mails I get from paypal are the ones confirming my transactions ... Never got any ads

kalleboo• 13 years ago

Same here. I must have unsubscribed.

frytaz• 13 years ago

Today fucking paypal suspended our account because there was 2500 euros income from one of our clients...

wpietri6• 13 years ago

I am impressed with PayPal's ability to be aggressively clueless in this regard.

For at least two years, they have beens sending me "monthly statements". Which a) don't contain any information, and b) are idiotic, because a monthly statement is an artifact of a paper-based world, not something that Paypal needs. There is no way to get off this mailing list, and if you try replying, it just bounces.

And EVERY TIME I USE PAYPAL they try to get me to sign up for "Bill Me Later TM". I have to say no each time. I've made something like 200 transactions in the last 5 years, and after 200 refusals they're still like, "Hey, how about this new thing called "Bill Me Later TM"!

I'm sure both of these techniques boost some short-term metric, but they guarantee that when I have another option, I use it. And I'm not alone. The other day while watching a user test, the subject spontaneously offered a colorful negative opinion, and said they used PayPal only when there was no other choice.

Building up user resentment like this means that they are very vulnerable to a competitor. One day somebody like Square is going to cross the good-enough threshold and the use-it-when-forced crowd will leave and never, ever return.

jrochkind1• 13 years ago

I agree that paypal's automated communication is bunk, but I don't know if monthly statements are artifacts of the paper world.

Anything where I have a regular bill due every month, I'm going to appreciate a monthly statement -- probably an electronic one of some kind. Right?

You know my favorite monthly statement? Every month I get an SMS message from AT&T "A $XX.yy bill is due. Reply with '1' to pay from credit card ending NNNN." WOOT! THAT's a monthly statement for the modern world.

But really, any business I have an ongoing relationship with them where i periodically need to pay them, I'm going to appreciate a monthly update on what I owe them, sometimes over email. (I'm not going to appreciate a poorly done marketting brochure for things I don't want disguised as a monthly statement)

wpietri6• 13 years ago

Sure, but PayPal's statement isn't for a bill. It's like a bank account statement.

Those are definitely artifacts of the paper age. For the first decade I used PayPal, if I wanted to know what had happened, I just looked at the website and saw recent transactions. Their "statement" is just an email with a link that takes you to the site to look at recent transactions. Its only point is to drive traffic; it adds zero value.

dfxm12• 13 years ago

I think the parent's point is that you can (and should) get your "monthly" statement anytime you want, for any time period you want, on demand, by going to <bank>'s website.

Monthly bank statements (which I think the parent is specifically talking about) are different from monthly bills in that statements don't require you to take action.

nemothekid• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if this is complete coincidence, but after using PayPal today to pay for a grubhub meal, they got rid of constantly trying to push Bill Me Later.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

Between all the phishing and the spam, I filter out all email from PayPal. Realistically they might send me something important someday and I'll miss it, and that's unfortunate... but I was developing such a habit of ignoring paypal-related emails anyways that automating the ignoring changes nothing.

frogpelt• 13 years ago

PayPal has figured out how to fool the new Gmail inbox. Others will follow suit.

exo_duz• 13 years ago

I never realised this was their marketing tools. I was wondering why they were normally sent at totally random times.

Time to unsubscribe / put to spam folder methinks.

Lewton• 13 years ago

I got something similar. Had to triple check that it was actually from Paypal because it was so clearly spam

vonskippy• 13 years ago

So is this really just another rant about PayPal - which would be hardly unique or unusual.

Or....

Is this just a ploy to get yet another stupid social media site some visibility traction on HN?

Hmmmmmmm?

Go Away PayPal

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