Other Software > Developer's Corner

“Is PayPal good for your microISV business?” A short PayPal horror story

(1/5) > >>

app103:
I’m running my Mac indie software business for more than 3 years now. For the first 2.5 years all my sales went through Kagi and later I decided to switch to PayPal. The sales were not high, PayPal worked well and all was good.

This year, me and my partner Kosta decided to do some creative marketing for our application, ImageFramer. We decided to partner with several other developers of graphics software for the Mac and to sell all the software together, as a bundle, for 2 weeks. After months of preparations, negotiations and development, finally, MacGraPhoto bundle was launched on Nov 16.

We, at Apparent Software, were responsible for all the execution of the sale and part of it included handling all the money related issues, such as collecting the payments and distributing to other developers their shares. There were 6 other developers in addition to us. We corresponded over email, sent them a Terms and Conditions document and got their agreement to it by email.

We chose PayPal as our payment processor for several reasons but the main were low fees, the fact that we already knew how to integrate it to the sales backend and that it should be easy to pay them and to affiliates. We used our regular PayPal account, which we used for regular sales. We didn’t expect what happened next.

The launch was successful and we were pleased with how the sales progressed in the first days. Three days into the sale I’ve got a phone call from PayPal and the person on the other side asked me about nature of the spike in account activity. I explained that we had a 2 week sale, a special promotion and it looked like the call went fine.
--- End quote ---

What happened next and what they put these poor developers through can only be described as a complete nightmare. Paypal has since resolved the issue, but what happened to them could happen to anyone.


http://blog.apparentsoft.com/business/124/is-paypal-good-for-your-microisv-business-a-short-paypal-horror-story/

f0dder:
Well, PayPal sucks for anything but small funds - no big news there, and the developers really should have done a bit of googling before they decided to handle things this way... Not saying that how PayPal handles business is good, but it's not exactly news that they screw people over.

Carol Haynes:
Strewth - what a mess! Seems the simple rule with PayPal is if you are going to be successful make sure you move away before you make any real money!

mouser:
im a big fan of paypal.. i know people occasionally have trouble with it, but they seem to be the best deal for small payments, and i've had nothing but good experiences with them.

Kamel:
wow, for once i actually read the whole thing.

it's really a shame how they acted. i really know how it feels to be put in a situation like that (to some extent), i've had to deal with fraud crap that wasn't fraud at all with companies and it was never fun. it's as if they assume you're the bad guy, and don't want to talk to you because of it.

glad i read this though, i know a certain company i will not use for collecting funds :O

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page