I would venture that most Paypal users have never had a problem with the world’s largest online payment processor yet hell fire and brimstone seem to be flowing about its name on the plethora of hate sites out there. I’ve been using Paypal for just under 5 years now and had never had a problem until this past Saturday.

As you may have read on Sam2k previously, over the last month or so I have been working on those pesky “freebie” sites that promise the greatest and bestest gadgets in exchange for completing some kind of advertised offer and getting a certain number of other people to do the same. The approach that I have been using involves the payment of others to sign up using my referral link and complete an offer. This approach has been marvelously successful and I was able to apply for review of my account on one of the sites Friday evening. Soon after submitting, one of my referrals was banned for violating the sites ToS. Since I had paid this person specifically to provide credit to my account, I sent him an email requesting that he return the monies I had paid him. I didn’t really want to drag the affair out, so when he offered me $19 (less than what I had paid him) in recompense, I accecpted.

From there, it all went downhill. Apparently, as soon as he sent the $19 to my Paypal account, he closed his own account. This caused Paypal’s system to throw a fraudulent activity flag and place a temporary hold on the payment I had received. When I received the email notifying me of this hold, I had not yet learned that this scammer had closed his account. So, being very confused, I called Paypal to find out what the problem was. I spoke to a moderately helpful Jim in Resolutions who was nice but unable to provide me with much information. He told me that I should contact the other party and request that he call Paypal. I did this but my friendly neighborhood scammer declined. So, I called back this afternoon and spoke with Rick in Resolutions for about 5 minutes. Rick told me that for the $19 it wasn’t worth either of our time and effort so he would just resolve the dispute for me and told me that if upon further review the payment is still diputed that I can call back and request a courtesy credit to cover it. This was an excellent response that perfectly addressed both my problem and the economics of the situation. I applaud Rick’s handling of the matter and respect the fact that Paypal gives its specialists the power to resolve problems without dragging things out. This may actually be the quickest dispute resolution I’ve ever been a part of. All told, the matter was resolved in less than 48 hours and only a few of them traditional business hours.

With customer service like this, I don’t understand why Paypal has so many haters. Sure, it was an inconvenience to me but there was no harm and it only took about an hour of my time. The lesson to be learned here is that reasonable people receive reasonable treatment from companies that they have dealings with, even Paypal. If you ever find yourself in a dispute, stay calm, reasonable, and talk it out.

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Tags: Payment Processing, Paypal, Paypal is good

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 3:34 pm and is filed under Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.