PayPal Ripping Me Off

[tnitty]

Paypal took something like 4% of my parking revenue from last month. It doesn't sound like much, but it added up to more than $100.

I don't understand. They sent me a message saying I'm only allowed to receive $500 per month before being charged. But I've earned much more than that for the past six months (when I started parking my domains), and never got charged before. Not sure why they suddenly decided to do this to my account now.

More importantly, though, is there a way to avoid this? Is this due to the fact that the parking co. I use doesn't have 'mass pay' or something? (I've heard of it, but don't know what it is, so I'm guessing...).

I don't want to switch parking co's. Is there a suggestion I can make to them or something I can do on my end? It seems like a total rip-off. I suppose I could have them send me a check each month, instead of using PayPal. But I'm hoping for an electronic solution, since the parking co is in a foreign country.

Thanks

p.s., is there a viable alternative to PayPal? I know Google has some 'checkout' thing, or something, but I don't see it used anywhere. Anything else? It seems like PayPal has a monopoly and is abusing it. Credit card co's charge only 1 or 2 percent (I think). PayPal's a great service, but there's no reason on earth why they deserve $100 for processing a routine transaction. What a joke.

 

[netmeg]

Some people refuse to take Amex or Mastercard.

We don't take Amex ourselves. Their fees are ungodly high. Like you say, choice.

 

[Sleepys]

While you consider Ebay a monopoly, the law is quite another matter. There is no law prohibiting other sites from running auctions (and many do). The fact that that are most popular does not make them a monopoly in the same way that AT&T was. The reason AT&T was a monopoly is because it did not allow ANY competition at all, because it owned all the phone lines. Companies, even if they wanted to run their own lines, would have wound up getting stifled by the city governments. Can you imagine telephone polls for every company out there?

The choice may not be profitable, but it's not against the law if there is a choice.

Then how could Microsoft have been a monopoly with Apple always there and a few other upstarts with little to no market share?

A monopoly was originally defined as being only 1 competitor and no one else, but you are entirely wrong if you think that the definition is currently that strict. There do become cases where at a certain market share a company becomes a monopoly. When this happens they are not allowed to control the market. The fact that there is another online auction house with maybe 4% market share and another one with 1% does not prove that they do not have a monopoly. It proves that they do have one. Also, in many categories, for items over a certain price, maybe $500, ebay has 100% market share. This is because once they have built up this large share of sellers, no one checks the other places. When no one checks the other places, no one sells on there. It is what is called a virtuous circle(or a vicious circle) in business, and after a while creates no choice, with no hope for competition, because they will never gain a foothold in the market without an even playing field.

I was only comparing it to AT&T as another example of a monopoly that needed to be split up. But, your comparison works, because ebay does prohibit all of the other payment types on the online auction market, which they conrtol and forced companies out of business like AT&T and Standard Oil.

Also, some sellers probably know this already, but certain colectable categories now require authentication from ebay's "authentication" service, which I believe is $30 on top of your other fees, each time. So that is another fee that, if you sell in a particular category you have to pay to ebay or you have no option for selling it online at auction. They can raise the fees all they want over and over again, sometimes multiple times a year, because of their current monopoly status. At least there was some backlash last year in the slight decrease in total listings.