Different ways to pay ...

I wanted to make this post because I have some very strong feelings about PayPal. PayPal is not the best solution for purchasing things online for a lot of reasons, most notably, the fact that they are not a bank of any kind and as such, are not held to the same standards or regulations that a regular bank would be. There have been many stories (in the tens of thousands) of people's PayPal accounts being frozen for months and months and in some cases, people completely losing many thousands of dollars to the PayPal system with no recourse whatsoever.

I have a friend who used to sell items on eBay and used the PayPal system. Without going into details or naming names, I will tell you they froze his assets (over $2000) for 6 months. He never did get any real explanation as to why. The current consensus is PayPal moves SO MUCH money that they regularly find ways to sit on yours and collect the interest. He no longer uses PayPal for obvious reasons and his comment now is that anyone selling things on the internet should ONLY be dealing with a merchant account from a real bank for processing credit cards. That's the only way you are afforded any protection on the internet and from companies like PayPal.

I noticed that my Dolphin 7 has PayPal built into it and it's a very easy thing to get setup. In fact, in my opinion, it's far too easy. Nothing good ever comes easy. I would very much like to see an alternative to PayPal created for Dolphin as I believe Dolphin is doing a disservice to it's membership by having PayPal as the only way to do financial transactions within it's community setup.

You know the old saying, Where's there's smoke, there is most certainly fire. If you don't think this is a real issue just Google 'PayPal Complaints'. You will find page after page after website of tens of thousands of complaints and stories. Even if most of them are bogus or inflated, the sheer volume of them should give you cause for concern.