PayPal now has a third option, which I discovered last night when I paid an RBWer for a shirt: The buyer pays through Friends & Family, but pays an additional fee on their own end to preserve their buyer protection (e.g., seller pockets money then sends damaged product/product not meeting presale description/sends no merch at all). This displaces the standard seller concern (*the percentage comes out of my end!*) while allaying some of the buyer's equally valid concerns when dealing with a seller they don't know IRL (*how do I know you're not going to rob me?*)
Most of the voiced complaints re PayPal/Venmo/Apple Pay etc. around here are those of sellers who think they've gotten burned, or who fear they might get burned. As a person who's been exclusively on the buyer end for 25 years, and who is still wrestling with eBay/PayPal over a $750 laptop that was allegedly "delivered" by FedEx (where the only evidence for a delivery is a BS FedEx delivery/tracking notice - I was standing on my porch when FedEx claims to have "delivered" it, and there was no truck), for which the commercial seller refuses to accept any liability (even though they said they didn't trust FedEx, for obviously good reason)...may I say that I think there are two sides to this issue, and I'm glad that someone with muscle is at least willing to pretend to contend for my interest. Because otherwise, I'd be out the price of a lot of bicycles, with nothing to show for it and nowhere to seek redress. And let's not ignore that in a lot of metro areas, there's a long history of attractive Craigslist ads as bait, placed simply to set buyers up to be mugged for the cash brought as payment for non-existant goods. In San Francisco (CL Central), the problem got so bad that the SFPD had a setup for awhile where exchange of payment/goods for CL purchases could happen under police supervision, in the parking lots of police stations. Sure, seller beware. But buyer beware, too. There's a reason that the latter one is a commonplace saying, and the former one isn't. As for "hearing of cases", I think that's a show-your-work thing. As I read it, once I send money F&F, it's gone; I have no way to get it back, whether the seller makes good on the transaction or not. Members of this group should note that every PayPal payment I've made to anyone here has always been F&F; this reflects not so much my trust of people's inherent decency (only people who don't know me would think I'm like that) as my pinchpennyness, my fatalism, and my hope for intolerable social censure in the event the transaction goes south. One thing to consider is, if a seller isn't willing to pay the Goods & Services fee to offer protection to a buyer (a fee which they should be incorporating into the total sales price, just as would happen with a shipping fee), why should a buyer trust them? Personally, if I insisted on buying a big-ticket item from a buyer too far away for me to pound on their front door who refuses to go the G&S route, I'd bite the bullet and pay the F&F protection fee, purely for my own safety. Peter Adler several times bit in Berkeley, CA/USA On Monday, March 8, 2021 at 11:35:05 AM UTC-8 Joe Bernard wrote: > Make sure you pull your payment from PayPal into your bank account right > away. > > On Monday, March 8, 2021 at 11:29:26 AM UTC-8 Eric Daume wrote: > >> PayPal has two modes, Friends & Family and Goods and Services. G&S >> charges a fee to the seller, I think 3%, but offers some protection for >> both parties. F&F doesn’t offer any protection. I’ve heard of cases where >> the buyer paid in F&F and then retracted the payment after they got the >> part. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/rbw-owners-bunch/13513d24-2c06-4ed6-b529-0c177c263d15n%40googlegroups.com.
