Counter-argument: as another customer, I much prefer anything but PayPal, which even pretends to offer guest checkout that you'd think might be no worse, but then actually creates an account 'for you' and emails you forever.

It might be a deal-breaker for me, and if another option exists, I'm hsing it 100% of the time. I don't need to log in, password manager or browser has my payment instrument saved ready to auto-fill, and I don't have to worry about security or privacy as much.

Your metric is asinine. I use PayPal only when absolutely necessary and/or basically low value items where I don’t care too much. I have a Facebook account too, doesn’t mean meta still isn’t screwed.

And why is this a popularity contest or that the uniformed public’s (or your) opinion matters? People do dumb financial shit all the time. In the US at least, PayPal puts you at a disadvantage from a fraud protection standpoint since they are yet another unfriendly, large essentially unregulated middleman to deal with.

He's saying what most customers do, and he's right. Most people prefer PayPal. Otherwise it would be easy to drop.

They also conflated PayPal, Apple Pay and Google pay, so I’m not sure I agree that what they were saying is “most people prefer PayPal”. PayPal has a tremendous market share - not sure I’d agree that it’s really a preference.

Prefer it over credit card, I mean. And most customers won't treat occasional emails as a dealbreaker.

I'd wager that a significant amount of that "prefer" is from it often being the first/default option at checkout.

If it's the first option, it's probably cause it's preferred by customers. It doesn't do anything good for the seller. Little Snitch in particular has credit card on the LHS and PayPal to the right, which kinda suggests PayPal being secondary.

> It doesn't do anything good for the seller.

Sure it does. It gives them relatively more chargeback protection at the expense of the consumer. And yes I’ve heard all the seller griping that this isn’t the case - as if it would be expected that they could shield them from 100% of chargebacks - it doesn’t make it true. It’s relatively harder for a customer to even get forward in the dispute process with PayPal in the mix. These sellers often aren’t evening seeing these killed disputes.

I was always under the impression that PayPal sided more with the buyer, but I'm not so sure. Hard to tell either way. At least they support a wider range of disputes than a CC would, question is how many customers can get that far.

> Most people have a PayPal account.

I extremely doubt that. Maybe in the US?

> Your "emails me forever" is not a real concern for 99% of users.

I'm not saying that is itself much of a problem, just that it isn't a guest checkout. It's not the accountless WorldPay/SagePay/Stripe/... alternative it presents itself as.

(As a result, more people have a PayPal account(s) than know it or want one. They refuse to delete mine without proof of identity, which I certainly didn't provide during checkout when it was created 'for me', so is not warranted and I'm not going to provide to allow my 'delete' request to result in net more of my data held...)

Count me among the many who prefer the superior UX that PayPal provides.

They're also excellent as a singular source for managing my subscriptions. If I ever forget what I'm subscribed to or want to cancel things, you can do it all in one place with PayPal just blocking further payments from processing from that business.

If people want PayPal to stop being used, then update your bank technology so the UX isn't so ass. Then perhaps we'll switch.

Also the fraud management is great, so if you do get cheated on paypal then you can near always get your money back. I would never start a business on it but as a paying customer it just works for me.

Credit card is also bad. That does not make PayPal acceptable.

It's frankly ridiculous that these are the only two widely supported options for international payment. It's easy to make something better, but somehow much of the world seems stuck with the two worst options.

It's not easy to make something better. Electronic payments are gonna be regulated and tracked to the fullest whether it's PayPal or someone else. The only digital solution is cryptocurrency, and love it or hate it, it has big hurdles.

> It's not easy to make something better.

Better solutions already exist. Just not internationally. And I frankly don't understand why.

I haven't seen anything better that fulfills the same purpose in the US. You can't use Zelle like PayPal. If you use Venmo with a business, it's basically the same as Paypal (besides being owned by Paypal). Stripe has similar rules around credit card payments. This is because of regulations, not technical issues.

Maybe the situation is better in certain countries, but who knows how long that'll last.

Yeah, if the US supported something decent, I'm sure most of the world would soon follow. Netherland unfortunately doesn't have that kind of pull. But the Dutch iDeal system for online payment is, as its name suggests, pretty much ideal.

When I buy something (on Steam or GOG, for example), I select iDeal as payment method, then select my bank, then the shop redirects me to my own bank's website which processes the payment, and then redirects me back to the webshop which knows that the payment succeeded. The webshop doesn't have to know anything about me except which bank to redirect me to.

Unfortunately it only supports Dutch banks, and lots of international webshops don't support it. To my bafflement, even lego.com doesn't support it, which is just plain weird (they intend to, they say, they just haven't gotten around to it yet in the 18 years that iDeal has been around).

For interpersonal payments, rather than from a shop, you can send someone a payment request. The brandname that named the idea is Tikkie, an app from a major Dutch bank, but I think it can be used by anyone no matter what your bank is, and it uses iDeal for the payment. But every bank now has its own payment request system. You just send someone a link, and they can choose how to pay it. It's ridiculously simple, and it's all done through your own bank. No need to trust any third party with your payment information.

That all sounds similar to US payment processors. But you aren't exposed to the challenges unless you're a business.

If domestic payments in the US use a similar system, can we please make this work across borders? Because everything from the US seems to work with credit cards or PayPal instead.

> It's easy to make something better, but somehow much of the world seems stuck with the two worst options.

You got some interesting cognitive dissonance there...

I don't think you know what cognitive dissonance actually is.

Is it when I hear voices in my head?

Probably try to pay with a Discover card too.

No. They're stating the preference to use Paypal if the vendor offers it - as opposed to entering CC numbers.

Thats not the only reason, if you never get your stuff you can handle that from paypal UI, you cant do that with alot of CC companies and have to phone somebody that might or might not respond in time, this is the sole reason why i prefer paypal over CC.

Which can be seen as enabling the problem, but whatever, people are gonna use the easier thing.