Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Is it safe to keep thousands of dollars in a PayPal account???

I have heard all these stories of people’s accounts getting hacked and PayPal freezing people’s accounts so this has made me really nervous about keeping a lot of money in my PayPal account. I know PayPal has a limit on how much money you can use daily. So my question is do any SUN entrepreneurs feel safe using PayPal and keeping a large sum of your money in a PayPal account ?

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Kansas Direct mail Service & Kansas Business Netwok

I would not feel comfortable doing this.  Not from a financial standpoint, but one of customer service.  Have you ever tried to call them and talk to someone?  Good luck.  I have had a significant payment problem with them due to a vendor going out of business.  I had paid the vendor via PayPal, then never got the goods. When I tried to claim fraud, I was out of luck.  I won`t use them for any future transactions.

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Tom Huffman - Founder of NiteTrip.
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#1 reason NOT to keep your money in Paypal:  They are NOT a bank.  Therefore, they have a totally different level of security, responsibility, and lots of other things that should be very important to you.  Plus, as one poster correctly stated, Paypal customer service is worse than terrible...it`s non-existent. 

Better idea:  If you make sales on Paypal and have excess cash on hand, withdraw it from Paypal immediately if not sooner, and either transfer to a bank or INGonline or anyplace safe, dependable, with customer support, and with a decent rate of return.

As you can see, I am NOT a big fan of Paypal.  They used to run a fine operation, but lately
they have become absolutely impossible to deal with. 

AMSPCS
amspcs@juno.com
www.MerchantServices-help.com

RUN, RUN as fast as you can from paypal. Get your money out!!!!

We too had heard the horror stories and I thought, gosh, we`ve been using them for some time now with no problems and WHAM, within a few short months, we were hacked and were lucky to get our $600 plus dollars back, but we did get it back. Of course it tied up our services for several days and that was not fun. We try to transfer money every few days to not let it accumulate but, if we get a run on sales, it accumulates, especially over the weekend when we are not as deligent. That is a little scary, we don`t like it to get up over a few hundred now.

We are now in the process of switching, we have had numerous issues, the last being that we have not been able to transfer to our accounts, for some reason they have a glitch in the system and we have to request checks that take forever, like 10 days to get, so try doing that every so many days, or even once a week, it is a HUGE PAIN!

Try to contact them, I finally got someone that could speak english and thought we were getting somewhere and was told it would be fixed in 3-4 days, several weeks now and nothing has been corrected.. . .UGH tired of talking to them and trying to get to someone that can help, we are SWITCHING!!!!

 

Here`s what we`ve preached for years:

Paypal has a place as A payment alternative. That means in conjunction with other payment options.  On the other hand, Paypal should never never never be offered as THE ONLY payment option (unless you are an incredibly small non-permanent business or eBay seller, something along those lines).  Reasons:  Lots of people refuse to use Paypal and it will cost you business.  Plus, once you acculumlate a pre-determined amount of funds in your account, you can expect holds, hassles, delays, you name it....in short, they`ll kill you cash flow and your business along with it.

Bottom line:  If you are a serious business,  you need a real merchant account.  It`s OK to tack on Paypal along side it as an additional option if you want, but your meat-and-potatoes should be a real merchant account.  Contrary to what a lot of people who use Paypal assume, a real merchant account need not be expensive or difficult to obtain or administer.

If you need to educate yourself about what a merchant account is all about, please see our
free informational website below for glossary, FAQ`s, explanation of fee structures, etc.

AMSPCS
amspcs@juno.com
www.MerchantServices-help.com