Resident Expert on PayPal & eBay

[Paul Martin]

If any of y'all ever have any questions about PayPal or eBay, especially in terms of how things work internally in those companies or how to make specific products work, or any other general customer-service type questions, I would be happy to volunteer to take a shot at answering them for you.

I worked at PayPal from February 2000 - May 2002 and still have a number of friends there (the handfull that haven't figured out it's time to leave yet). My official title was "Senior Product Manager - Auctions", and basically I was in charge of all of PayPal's eBay-related products (in addition to PayPal Shops and my favorite and most profitable product of all time: the forced-upgrade of all business users to fee-bearing accounts), so I pretty much know how everything works over there.

And don't worry, I'm not an apologist for the legion of errors and downright bad decisions being made at eBay & PayPal these days, especially not eBay, since the real purpose of my position at PayPal was to kill eBay's payments company, Billpoint (aka eBay Payments), and I learned to hate those guys pretty bad in the process.

Rock on,
Paul

[Robert]

It's funny because I'm working on integrating PayPal with the forums right now. Everything is working on PayPal's end, but the forum, well that's another story. Of course, it's me that fiddles with the code in the forum so...

By the way, I'm very glad you are here because there will be questions that come up. Of course, Linda is going to remind me daily that she's the one that told you about the forum so I'll owe her a night of babysitting or something.

I personally have had great experiences with PayPal. Earlier this year I noticed a charge on my PayPal debit card that I hadn't made. I called PayPal and got through to a person in about 10 minutes. He explained how to cancel the card and register for a refund. I did so and a couple of weeks later the money was refunded.

Apparently an employee at a pizza place collected the card info when we placed an order. But one of the fraud/security people that work for the pizza chain figured it out and we even got the order we had placed refunded.

[Cedara]

I am sure I will be asking you questions soon enough! LOL
I have PayPal as the preferred payment option on my website and so far have had not a bit of a problem...its actually come in quite handy.

Cedara

[Cindy~Homespun]

GREAT, I'm sure I'll have lots of questions too! I'm a co-moderator of an ebay group.... and we always have questions on how certain things work or the do's don't's of listing auctions (the ebay police have cancelled our auctions more than once - by the way, does that happen cause someone reported us?).

Hmmmm .... any chance I could get you to attend one of our chats? I am in charge of education and would absolutely LOVE to have an expert to tell us some insider tips! (as much as you can obviously). I could get a list of questions to you ahead of time?

I'll be thinking about this all night now

[Paul Martin]

Dear Cindy,

The eBay police can find auctions that are in violation in several different ways. As you noted, people will report you, and this is perhaps the #1 way that violations are discovered. Secondly, they have automated scripts that go through all the auctions on their site (as they are listed) that look for specific words that are often correlated with listing violations, and those auctions are then looked at by a human. Thirdly, they have people who specialize in finding violations and use various methods for tracking them down.

That said, a large percentage of the auctions that are in violation are not discovered at all.

Send me a private message or an email and so we can discuss the chat with your eBay group.

Have a good evening!

- Paul

[computergal]

Hello Mr Martin. I have a number of questions, But I will just start with a few. I have been kicked off ebay for no reason at all. Their excuse was that I was associated with another account. So I offered them all the proof in the world that I was not associated with this other account. They dismissed me and said that I could continue to dispute their finding but no further action will be taken . That is just unfair. I had 12 positive feedbacks. Happy customers and then boom, kicked off. I was selling electronics. So there were no violations of the TOS. So whats the deal? I cant sell with them anymore, unless I go to great lengths to get back on. What can a I do to get back on or start over? Thank you.

[jmjj215]

Based on many stories that I hear, it seems unsafe to leave large sums of money in your paypal account. Apparently they can freeze it if there is any dispute? The interest rate is tempting, but I'd hate to lose access to my funds, even for a short time.

Any thoughts on this?

[Paul Martin]

Computergal,

It's hard to tell what might have happened from what you've told me. If you could send me the email notification that eBay sent you regarding your suspension, as well as your eBay user ID, that would give me a much better idea of the situation. eBay's reasons for doing things are often pretty questionable, but there is always a reason.

We're actually heading out for a nice Thanksgiving vacation today, but I'll have access to email a couple of times during the week, and I'd be happy to look into it for you. My personal email is [email protected]

Take care,
Paul

[Paul Martin]

Jesse,

We have always kept all of our business' capital in the PayPal account, and have never had a problem. Occasionally there will be a chargeback from a customer, and the funds from that transaction are frozen during the dispute (not the whole account), but we have actually lost a chargeback dispute, so those have just been temporary annoyances, and I don't worry about them at all anymore.

Back when I was working at PayPal, our Fraud team was still pretty new at their jobs, and the fraud problem was enormous, so their tendency was to over-react. For a while there we were freezing entire (innocent) accounts all the time. But that problem seems to have been mostly resolved.

- Paul

[jmjj215]

Thanks for putting me at ease