The level of discourse on HN lately is absurd. Here is a new CEO that appears to be looking to change things for the positive, yet everyone wants to be cynical and doubting. Yet when startups have major f* ups, the conversation is much different.
Lets all admit change is slow and that paypal is still one of the more trusted payment solutions accepted globally. It would be nice to be able to use them in the future with some continued reliability.
The skepticism about PayPal is well founded. PayPal has rightfully earned a reputation of imposing arbitrary decisions on account holders. Maybe if PayPal was more transparent and actually provided some semblance of customer service their decisions would appear more fair.
While its nice that the CEO has personally responded this actually shows a far greater dysfunction. Why should it take escalating all the way up to the CEO level to get someone at PayPal to listen and advocate for the customers position?
The contrast with startups is misleading. PayPal has been in business for a long time and is a billion dollar company. They have the resources to stop making stupid mistakes, but still persist in their bad behavior. They can get away with this because they've cornered a large part of the online payments marketplace.
Sure, a startup is going to make mistakes. And they're expected to. That's all a startup is really - a machine that generates mistakes in an attempt to find (or build) a profitable market.
What about the Yahoo! transformation currently being led by their new CEO, Mrs. Mayer? My view, and most of the things I've read about the Yahoo! situation is that people are generally optimistic about the change in leadership and feel that she is not only talking the talk, but walking the walk.
I don't have the same confidence in this type of change happening inside PayPal and I'm not sure why. Maybe its because, as a financial institution, I view it as a very "corporate" entity that resists change. Whereas Yahoo! is, in my mind, has a "hacker" feel that recognizes the problems and really wants to make things better. I guess I have more faith in Marisa and the kind of company that I know Yahoo! can become, whereas I've already written off PayPal as a necessary evil that can/will be replaced as soon as possible.
For the moment all this means that a high-profile person got his funds unblocked and has a direct communication channel to the CEO. Meaning he's pretty much back to where he was before PayPal set him back.
For my personal blocked account, it means exactly nothing.
I think its good that a CEO steps up and reaches out to customers, but many people have had bad experiences with funds being frozen on PayPal along with their terrible phone support, and things like that never get forgotten. I get the impression that addressing fraud on PayPal's global scale is very hard. But they could make things a little more bearable by training their phone support people to be at least a little more polite and customer-oriented.
First off, I agree. However there is a difference between a new player tripping at a hurdle and an old hand making the same mistake. There is an expectation (by me at least) that tricky situations have been encountered by large organisations before, and that a combination of institutional knowledge and good systems prevent problems escalating. New businesses deserve (I think) a little more leeway.
This isn't special... Yet. What happened here can happen even in the most dysfunctional customer service paradigms. A promblem randomly and luckily escalated from the people who can't do anything about the problem to the people who (generally speaking) won't do anything about the problem. As a lucky break, the person/department who generally won't do anything, decided in their mercy to do something this one time. IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise.
The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.
"IMHO, what was said in the email is just marketing duck-speak, no matter how sincere it sounds until proven otherwise."
I agree that this looks like a PR stunt, but it also shows some potential changes underfoot at Paypal.
Here's my read of the situation: Paypal has been known for being beauracratic ever since the eBay acquisition, when all the smart people left and the bozos and middle managers remained. You know the type of place and the type of people it attracts: it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.
Don't tell us we have bad customer service issues; expressing that kind of negative attitude is not going to impress senior management, what with bonus season coming up. Stripe and Square are just dipshit startups that no real business will ever use. La-la-la I can't hear you.
It seems someone at eBay finally realised PayPal was going to be "disrupted" if it didn't get a leader with their shit together. This new guy seems competent, but steering a big lumbering ship like PayPal away from its death course takes serious political/organisation-hacking skills, no matter how big the icebergs loom.
Respectfully disagree. CEOs of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies do not routinely reach out to disgruntled customers, no matter how public the PR disasters. Twitter has been very effectively leveraged in the past with various underperforming companies, however IIRC all of those cases were delegated to customer service / marketing personnel.
While you are correct that this intervention bore many of the hallmarks of a PR effort, the scope is unusual. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would certainly be very surprised if anyone could dig up multiple examples of similar behavior on the part of a President/CEO or even any C-suite executive in a company of this size.
TL;DR: Personally looking after an account and handing out a cell phone number is not business as usual. There may be an element of PR, but it is quite proactive by most standards of measure.
I had the honor of actually having a direct email exchange with Steve Jobs in the context of difficulties doing business with Apple. In a last ditch effort to solve the issues I decided to email Steve. I had never done that before. While I was convinced that it was pointless, I did it anyway. It was three in the morning here in California. I was programming and shot off a two line email not saying much more that I needed help resolving a business issue with Apple.
Fifteen minutes later I get this:
What's the problem?
-Steve
I must have stared at that email for an hour. Not sure if it was a hoax or the real deal. I wasn't even sure that I had the right email address.
I replied anyway.
The next day I got a phone call from a high-level VP who had been asked by Steve to personally look into the issues. This led to many meetings and even a couple of trips up to Cupertino to meet them all and discuss further. The problem was addressed to everyone's satisfaction.
Having the CEO of a large company take the time to take personal ownership of an issue is special.
No, not a PR stunt. As a new CEO in an organization, it is difficult to get access to the kind of data and examples you need in order to create change throughout the organization. I've seen this first-hand advising new CEOs on their first 100-days as a consultant (before I started my startup). Good new CEOs will often try to find customer stories which capture the specific problems they're trying to fix, and use those stories to champion change. Frankly, this is pretty similar to a tactic used by politicians to illustrate their policy proposals with individual human stories. Marcus needs those stories now to create change in the company.
My hat goes off to Marcus, and I'm a bit surprised at the pessimism from HN. Tilt at windmills much?
It is special that the CEO responded AND put his reputation on the line by saying he was going to fix this.
If he doesn't fix the problem, in a few months he's going to be inundated with blog posts saying "David Marcus promised this would be fixed and it isn't".
So he's set himself a very public (and difficult) challenge, and I respect that.
The thing is, this "fix" only came about outside of their entire customer service mechanism (AFAICT). How many more disenfranchised customers are going to get "a direct line" to @davidmarcus? My guess is "none."
This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
Not necessarily. Between writing that email & it being publish that CEO is now very much committed to this since its his reputation on the line now. He said he'll get it done.
Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of details in the mail that one can call the CEO out for if it doesn't happen but its a good start and in my opinion more than a PR stunt.
Here is what I would do... I would take him up on his offer (personal attention from the CEO? Sure!), but I would ask him whether he'd be willing to pick 3 or 4 other customers who had _NOT_ written an article which had gone viral and offer THEM the same deal.
I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.
Ooh! Ooh! Pick me! Pick me! I had 20K removed from my account without an explanation and even hired a lawyer, all of which went absolutely nowhere.
This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter".
Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
From the skepticism here, it's clear Mr. Marcus has his work cut out for him. Even with far fewer people ever reporting to me (directly and indirectly) than him, I sympathize with his inability to get the unvarnished truth from his own people. "We're routinely screwing people out of hard cash" is probably a scary message to relay up.
His email sounded sincere, and he's new to the job. I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must know that the technorati hating his company is bad for business.
They have their work cut out for them indeed, but it's of there own making. They should have been looking at systemic issues when the Minecraft founder couldn't get access to his account for months, when their customer service advised someone to destroy a perfectly good violin due to "fraud", apparently mass payment doesn't exist even when it does [1],
numerous reviews in magazines such as PC World [2] and Kernel Magazine [3], and an entire website devoted to how bad they are was established from pissed off customers [4].
PayPal are in big trouble. It's going to take more than platitudes to get them out of it!
Step one for PayPal would be to always provide a reason when they take action, for all users. Every bad experience I have had with PayPal began with them doing something negative, and never explaining why they did it. I have had methods of payment locked out, I have had funds not released, I have been told I could not make an instant payment, and not once was I given a reason why.
I agree that they should always try to give you a reason. But that's not as easy as it sounds.
Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere.
It's a hard problem. PayPal solved it the wrong way, but they'll never get to full transparency.
Try asking your regular bank how their fraud detection works, or your insurance company, or the secret service.
Basically if you work in fraud detection (or broadly any kind of crime detection) you keep your techniques secret because otherwise you're helping the criminals avoid you.
Look at the source code for Reddit or Hacker News, notice how in the publicly released codebases they've both chosen specifically not to publish the code to do with vote-rigging detection.
I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service).
Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?
Classic case of someone who just can't win whatever he does. People have been crying out for PayPal to change - he notices this, he emails the guy with a first class email but still gets criticised. Criticise him if he doesn't act, don't criticise the guy for being big enough to say 'hey, we have a problem, I want to fix it' - that should be applauded, even if it's come later than people would have liked - at least it has come.
If even a modicum of this attitude can seep down into all of the customer facing departments at PayPal, it'd be an awesome thing. I hope they pull it off.
Actually it would be 'life saving'. One of the reasons the payments space is flourishing is because PayPal has been a poor service provider (creating pain). And it has to come from the top, and you have to look into success metrics carefully to insure the folks in your organization aren't doing more harm than good to get 'good' ones.
Agreed. I hope the policy and attitude can change. I do a lot of business with PayPal because my customers prefer it. Certainly not because they have provided much value other than being the most commonly used service.
I realize you are being cynical, but the e-mail says the CEO wants to make radical changes to fix issues for all customers. I'm a bit skeptical myself, but if we take him for his word this isn't just for a subset of users.
Great email.. one of the most convincing and sincere high level apologies I've read. Perhaps, for once, the future is looking bright for Paypal. I could have done without the "forwarded from my iPad" at the bottom though.
Perhaps one of the reasons PayPal is being more service conscious is they finally have competition encroaching on their territory like Stripe + Square.
I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.
While the CEO has only been onboard for 5 months now, these kind of issues plaguing Paypal have been there for years now. I remember a good friend of mine had his Paypal account frozen a few years back because they thought it was suspicious he had received money so quickly (he was selling a popular marketing eBook). After making him jump through hoops to get his money (identification, financial records and scans of his passport, etc) he finally received the cash 7 months later, by that stage he was ruined emotionally and financially due to the fact it was his living (he couldn't pay bills or anything).
While I applaud the new CEO wants to make amends, for some like my friend who relied on Paypal to make a living by processing his business payments it's a little too late. Although Paypal is still the industry leader (because they have a stranglehold on online payments) the new CEO knows that offerings like Stripe and whatnot are making Paypal less and less relevant each and every day.
I would love to see Paypal change, the first thing they need to do is fire all of their customer service staff and train new staff with a new set of guidelines, implement a clean-cut way of contacting Paypal if something goes wrong and clean their act up.
In the previous post David replied to the comment (on HN) i made about wanting to change paypal's generic template to increase sales through a/b testing.I had a rant about paypal's api suckness and i also ranted about how draconian the fund freezes of diaspora and wikileaks were.
He said that he understands and told me to send him an email and we will take care of it.
No email was sent yet as i'm afraid i'll be targeted in the future. I can't put my legitimate digital business at that risk - there are tonnage upon tonnage of forum threads over the web of people's business going under because of pp freezes only because they contacted paypal it's heart breaking and too much of a red flag to me.
The only thing i can say about David is that he looks and sounds like a genuine guy who replied and started a discussion with the community and that as we all know goes a long way. So maybe his intentions are good but will paypal have zappos's culture regarding merchants all of a sudden? i doubt it and you all doubt it too because what matters is implementation ie real life.
Credit where it's due: out of all the hundreds of Paypal horror stories, this is the first time I have ever seen a reasonable, let alone personable, response come from that nebulous digital beast.
Fair play to the new CEO, he has won back one notch of respect and hopefully averted the slow motion train wreck that had probably already started at Paypal.
It's fantastic to see PayPal finally paying attention to these kinds of nightmare stories, but it's hard to believe it has anything to do with altruism.
They are seeing Stripe, Square, etc getting way more mindshare, and they are scared.
With all due respect PayPal, good riddance. You've sucked too hard for too long, and now we finally have alternatives.
Why now? Why this situation is it finally hitting home?
What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.
Posting screenshots of text instead of text make me sad.
It excludes visually-challenged people from this discussion, makes old people get out their glasses and squint, and makes cutting and pasting impossible.
Why does it take a story to make it to front page Hacker News to get attention, to get a "direct channel" to the executives when things go wrong? It ignores the all the horrible complaints and stories from everybody else. It's inequity in itself when the only way you will get attention from big companies is from making posts on Hacker News.
Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?
[+] [-] angryasian|13 years ago|reply
Lets all admit change is slow and that paypal is still one of the more trusted payment solutions accepted globally. It would be nice to be able to use them in the future with some continued reliability.
[+] [-] pygorex|13 years ago|reply
While its nice that the CEO has personally responded this actually shows a far greater dysfunction. Why should it take escalating all the way up to the CEO level to get someone at PayPal to listen and advocate for the customers position?
The contrast with startups is misleading. PayPal has been in business for a long time and is a billion dollar company. They have the resources to stop making stupid mistakes, but still persist in their bad behavior. They can get away with this because they've cornered a large part of the online payments marketplace.
Sure, a startup is going to make mistakes. And they're expected to. That's all a startup is really - a machine that generates mistakes in an attempt to find (or build) a profitable market.
[+] [-] teaneedz|13 years ago|reply
I give PayPal credit for this response. Rather than being cynical, I'm happier giving credit to someone who wants to make things better.
Mr. Marcus - some of us appreciate your efforts here.
[+] [-] Corrado|13 years ago|reply
I don't have the same confidence in this type of change happening inside PayPal and I'm not sure why. Maybe its because, as a financial institution, I view it as a very "corporate" entity that resists change. Whereas Yahoo! is, in my mind, has a "hacker" feel that recognizes the problems and really wants to make things better. I guess I have more faith in Marisa and the kind of company that I know Yahoo! can become, whereas I've already written off PayPal as a necessary evil that can/will be replaced as soon as possible.
[+] [-] jwr|13 years ago|reply
For my personal blocked account, it means exactly nothing.
[+] [-] damian2000|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lostlogin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noonespecial|13 years ago|reply
The true fix, the actuall turnaround, is when the ability to actually fix problems like this is systemically extended deep into the space previously occupied by the employees who couldn't fix them before.
[+] [-] IsaacL|13 years ago|reply
I agree that this looks like a PR stunt, but it also shows some potential changes underfoot at Paypal.
Here's my read of the situation: Paypal has been known for being beauracratic ever since the eBay acquisition, when all the smart people left and the bozos and middle managers remained. You know the type of place and the type of people it attracts: it's the smooth-talking-but-not-that-bright individuals who do well, and any smart employees who perceive the real problems the company is in find themselves a part of an outcast fringe.
Don't tell us we have bad customer service issues; expressing that kind of negative attitude is not going to impress senior management, what with bonus season coming up. Stripe and Square are just dipshit startups that no real business will ever use. La-la-la I can't hear you.
It seems someone at eBay finally realised PayPal was going to be "disrupted" if it didn't get a leader with their shit together. This new guy seems competent, but steering a big lumbering ship like PayPal away from its death course takes serious political/organisation-hacking skills, no matter how big the icebergs loom.
[+] [-] doktrin|13 years ago|reply
Respectfully disagree. CEOs of multi-billion dollar publicly traded companies do not routinely reach out to disgruntled customers, no matter how public the PR disasters. Twitter has been very effectively leveraged in the past with various underperforming companies, however IIRC all of those cases were delegated to customer service / marketing personnel.
While you are correct that this intervention bore many of the hallmarks of a PR effort, the scope is unusual. While I am happy to be proven wrong, I would certainly be very surprised if anyone could dig up multiple examples of similar behavior on the part of a President/CEO or even any C-suite executive in a company of this size.
TL;DR: Personally looking after an account and handing out a cell phone number is not business as usual. There may be an element of PR, but it is quite proactive by most standards of measure.
[+] [-] robomartin|13 years ago|reply
I had the honor of actually having a direct email exchange with Steve Jobs in the context of difficulties doing business with Apple. In a last ditch effort to solve the issues I decided to email Steve. I had never done that before. While I was convinced that it was pointless, I did it anyway. It was three in the morning here in California. I was programming and shot off a two line email not saying much more that I needed help resolving a business issue with Apple.
Fifteen minutes later I get this:
I must have stared at that email for an hour. Not sure if it was a hoax or the real deal. I wasn't even sure that I had the right email address.I replied anyway.
The next day I got a phone call from a high-level VP who had been asked by Steve to personally look into the issues. This led to many meetings and even a couple of trips up to Cupertino to meet them all and discuss further. The problem was addressed to everyone's satisfaction.
Having the CEO of a large company take the time to take personal ownership of an issue is special.
[+] [-] jchung|13 years ago|reply
My hat goes off to Marcus, and I'm a bit surprised at the pessimism from HN. Tilt at windmills much?
[+] [-] foxylad|13 years ago|reply
If he doesn't fix the problem, in a few months he's going to be inundated with blog posts saying "David Marcus promised this would be fixed and it isn't".
So he's set himself a very public (and difficult) challenge, and I respect that.
[+] [-] rhizome|13 years ago|reply
This is a pure PR maneuver. The proof is in the pudding.
[+] [-] dkarl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Havoc|13 years ago|reply
Unfortunately there aren't a whole lot of details in the mail that one can call the CEO out for if it doesn't happen but its a good start and in my opinion more than a PR stunt.
[+] [-] narsil|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcherm|13 years ago|reply
I want this to be true. I want PayPal to believe that this behavior is harmful to their business and to push (at ALL levels of the company) to change how they treat their customers. But I won't give them the benefit of the doubt based on one message from the CEO. They burned their second chances long ago, and it's much harder to regain my trust after losing it. I hope that they do.
[+] [-] maratd|13 years ago|reply
This is all a bunch of baloney. If PayPal was really serious about fixing all the pain and misery they caused, they would create a direct line of communication where those on the other end were empowered to resolve all problems ... instead of giving a curt "send us a letter".
Until PayPal starts working with their customers and stops treating them like criminals, I'll take my business elsewhere.
[+] [-] apeace|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmbaggett|13 years ago|reply
His email sounded sincere, and he's new to the job. I'd be inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. He must know that the technorati hating his company is bad for business.
[+] [-] chris_wot|13 years ago|reply
PayPal are in big trouble. It's going to take more than platitudes to get them out of it!
1. http://christianowens.com/post/15771850658/my-recent-experie...
2. http://www.pcworld.com/article/101525/consumer_alert_paypals...
3. http://www.kernelmag.com/comment/column/2978/paypal-still-su...
4. http://www.paypalsucks.com/
[+] [-] rhizome|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkulchenko|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] njloof|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wpietri|13 years ago|reply
Put yourself in the position of somebody who is trying to commit massive fraud. E.g., by purporting to sell a bunch of stuff on-line. Every bit of information you have about how PayPal combats fraud is helpful. Every time PayPal gives somebody a reason, it helps fraudsters avoid that particular wall or trap, letting them probe the defenses elsewhere.
It's a hard problem. PayPal solved it the wrong way, but they'll never get to full transparency.
[+] [-] ig1|13 years ago|reply
Basically if you work in fraud detection (or broadly any kind of crime detection) you keep your techniques secret because otherwise you're helping the criminals avoid you.
Look at the source code for Reddit or Hacker News, notice how in the publicly released codebases they've both chosen specifically not to publish the code to do with vote-rigging detection.
There's a strong argument for secrecy.
[+] [-] rhizome|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UnoriginalGuy|13 years ago|reply
I've been reading similar complaints to that for years. Some of which were far worse in my view (i.e. taking money out of banks to repay people who weren't even seeking a refund because PayPal changed its mind about someone's product or service).
Why does PayPal suddenly care? Is it because there is viable competition now?
[+] [-] sw007|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sync|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petercooper|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akcreek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] notatoad|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rm999|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlack|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] coryl|13 years ago|reply
I guess its never too late to stop sucking though.
[+] [-] DigitalSea|13 years ago|reply
While I applaud the new CEO wants to make amends, for some like my friend who relied on Paypal to make a living by processing his business payments it's a little too late. Although Paypal is still the industry leader (because they have a stranglehold on online payments) the new CEO knows that offerings like Stripe and whatnot are making Paypal less and less relevant each and every day.
I would love to see Paypal change, the first thing they need to do is fire all of their customer service staff and train new staff with a new set of guidelines, implement a clean-cut way of contacting Paypal if something goes wrong and clean their act up.
[+] [-] propercoil|13 years ago|reply
He said that he understands and told me to send him an email and we will take care of it. No email was sent yet as i'm afraid i'll be targeted in the future. I can't put my legitimate digital business at that risk - there are tonnage upon tonnage of forum threads over the web of people's business going under because of pp freezes only because they contacted paypal it's heart breaking and too much of a red flag to me.
The only thing i can say about David is that he looks and sounds like a genuine guy who replied and started a discussion with the community and that as we all know goes a long way. So maybe his intentions are good but will paypal have zappos's culture regarding merchants all of a sudden? i doubt it and you all doubt it too because what matters is implementation ie real life.
[+] [-] philhippus|13 years ago|reply
Fair play to the new CEO, he has won back one notch of respect and hopefully averted the slow motion train wreck that had probably already started at Paypal.
[+] [-] appleflaxen|13 years ago|reply
They are seeing Stripe, Square, etc getting way more mindshare, and they are scared.
With all due respect PayPal, good riddance. You've sucked too hard for too long, and now we finally have alternatives.
[+] [-] skennedy|13 years ago|reply
What confuses me is that David acts as if these are new stories of accounts frozen, staggered access to money, and blocked recourse to customer chargebacks. This has been happening for years with hundreds of publicly written stories of bad will by PayPal.
[+] [-] comex|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] switch007|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hollerith|13 years ago|reply
It excludes visually-challenged people from this discussion, makes old people get out their glasses and squint, and makes cutting and pasting impossible.
[+] [-] RobotCaleb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ars|13 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=davidmarcus
[+] [-] keithvan|13 years ago|reply
Why are they not paying attention to their other day-to-day customers? What kind of business do you intend on building?