May 17, 2005

<b>Curious George: Paypal Alternatives</b> There have been a few previous threads about PayPal's various sucking ways, but none of them revealed any better alternatives. Have any monkeys found ways of making online credit card transactions, for non-physical goods, that don't leave them wide open to fraudulent charge reversals? [More inside]

A bit of background: I am an administrator for a long-running, relatively popular MUD. In order to offset significant bandwidth costs, we accept donations via PayPal, for minor in-game conveniences. Maddeningly frequently, some of larger donations have been reversed as fraudulent, up to four months after the transaction was made. Paypal automatically reverses these charges without question, and attempts to fix this problem are for naught. Is there a superior, more honest service we could be using?

posted by duende 18 years ago
  • I don't know about superior or "more honest" but Greenzap will be getting started soon and has plans to compete directly with Paypal, so that could be interesting.
  • genial, do you know anything else about greenzap? they look interesting, but I'm getting a pyramid scheme vibe off it. The /. thread has some good suggestions for places... this also seems relevant to monkeyfilter, as we've had to collect $ for various things and not everyone can/will use Paypal.
  • I actually don't know anything about Greenzap, just happened to find it with a Google search. The lack of https gives me bad vibes though (along with the rediculouz endingz of wordz with zzzz). My honest opinion is that there really isn't anything better than Paypal at this time. A good point was made in the /. thread about the fact that you will deal with fraudulent charges regardless of whether you go with Paypal or not. As a merchant you have to deal with that.