paypal - now in AUD

I have to say that Paypal constantly improves its service. Within the last few months, they have allowed fee-free transfers (for amounts over $150) to Australian bank accounts, and now they are offering Australian dollar payments as well.

This is a stark contrast with the average Australian bank which increase their fees and charges with monotonous regularity.

Of course, Paypal doesn't pay you any interest, but then I would challenge you to find an Australian bank that will let you accept international and credit card payments with no up-front cost and the low transaction cost that Paypal offers.

I know there are WWW sites out there with some horror stories to tell w.r.t. Paypal, but my experiences as a user for the past few years have been very positive. Admittedly, I would not ever leave vast sums of money lying around in a Paypal account, as I think you have to be realistic -- if anything goes wrong, you are kissing your money goodbye most likely. So with the fee-free transfer of A$150, there is no reason to keep more than A$150 in my Paypal account, so therefore I can control my risk to be between $0 and $150 (average risk $75) which seems a pretty fair deal for the convenience of Paypal.

Admittedly, reading the horror stories, I do have some doubts about how genuine some of the complaints are. A lot of the complaints do seem to relate to Paypal closing or suspending accounts of people who violate their terms of service (having multiple accounts beyond the basic one personal, one business rule) etc, which one assumes was motivated to try to avoid fees and so forth. So, I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who tried to rip off Paypal and then found Paypal didn't like them any more!

However, there does seem to be a more legitimate class of complaint relating to people whose paypal accounts are frozen when paypal suspects some kind of fraudulent activity, which includes payments being made using a stolen credit card. Understandably, the account holder who has the misfortune of receiving a payment from someone using a stolen credit card can legitimately feel aggreived that paypal treats them like a suspect and freezes their account. But paypal's concern is that people who steal credit cards apparently do set up paypal accounts in order to launder stolen funds via paypal, and so they are suspicious of any account holder receiving funds in this way. So, having your account frozen because you are a victim of a payment made with a stolen card seems to be one of the risks you just have to accept with Paypal -- hence the importance I guess of not leaving vast sums in your account.

There are some competitors to paypal but they all seem to offer less and cost more than paypal. I notice bidpay will no longer accept Mastercard -- no idea why, but that's surely a pretty dumb move on their part given the number of Mastercard users out here. And if all those Mastercard buyers move away, so will the sellers.