Founded in 1998 and launched on the stock market just four years later, PayPal is a leading e-commerce provider that handles a large percentage of all online transactions, trumping all other online payment systems out there. Processing close to $230 billion in 2014 alone, and with members in close to 200 countries, it doesn’t get much bigger than this, which is why PayPal is the most revered name in online payment processing.
Let’s get the positives out of the way first. PayPal might not be the easiest or the quickest payment provider, but most people have accounts and most people have used the service before, so everything is very familiar. Most of us understand the PayPal interface and we also know it can be trusted. After all, when it comes to security, you can’t get much safer than PayPal.
In the old days, you needed a PayPal account to complete transactions online, but that is no longer the case and providing you have a credit card, you can get money into your gambling account. If you want to withdraw winnings back into your bank account, then you will need a PayPal account, but these days they don’t require you to be verified in order to make this happen.
A lot has changed over the years and most of these changes came about as a result of angry customers complaining about stupid little rules that only served to get in the way. The fact that you don’t need a PayPal account to complete transactions make things easier for most, but if you’re gambling on a regular basis, then signing up will make things easier. PayPal is the perfect way to bankroll your gambling. Not only can you keep all of your bankroll in one safe place, but it can be accessed instantly, it can be withdrawn to your bank account when needed and it can be used on as many sites as you want.
In the early days, PayPal refused to cooperate with gambling sites, but they saw the error of their ways, realised just how much extra business they could have if they changed their rules, and these days most sportsbooks and casinos accept PayPal, including the likes of BetVictor, William Hill, Bet365 and others. This means that you can fund your PayPal account from a credit card or a debit card, and then use that money to fund any number of gambling accounts.
That’s a huge positive and it certainly comes in handy. As we have already mentioned, PayPal is also very easy to use and keeping track of all incomings and outgoings is easy as well. What’s more, you can also use it to pay friends and family and to buy things online. It does everything a bank account does, and those of you who are worried about giving too many sites your financial details, with PayPal you don’t have to. Just give them your details, fund your account and let that account do the rest.
Of course, PayPal is far from perfect. There are websites and communities out there that are devoted to discussing PayPal in a negative light, and not without reason. One of the main issues that people have with PayPal is that it is very difficult to get any sort of response from their customer support staff, and if you do manage to find the one person willing to send a reply, the chances of you getting any useful information are slim. We have a lot of personal experience with this, and of the dozens of conversations we have had with them, through phone and email, and the dozens of issues we have had, none have been pleasant and none have been solved.
Another issue with PayPal is the “charge back” which has destroyed many an eBay trader throughout the years. Basically, if you purchase something on eBay and then don’t receive it, despite the client claiming otherwise, then you can tell PayPal and they will get your money back (by force if need be) and give you it. What’s more, they don’t ask for proof and simply take your word for it. This might sound great, and in a perfect world it would be, but this world is not perfect and it’s certainly not honest. Cue an entire community of “buyers” who use PayPal to claim money back on items they receive, ripping sellers off in the process. The same applies for any transaction, which is why you should always be wary when receiving money through PayPal, no matter where it came from.
Of course, on a gambling site, this isn’t much of an issue, unless of course you’ve signed up to a very suspicious and dishonest site. Still, it’s a major issue that many users have with this service, and one that is only compounded by the fact that when they want to complain, when they want to open a dispute or get some correspondence going, they just can’t get an answer out of PayPal.
PayPal is probably not the best payment service out there. It has grown too big and seems to have stopped caring. Of course, most of PayPal is automated anyway and most of the time it runs smoothly, but when those issues do occur, it can be near impossible to get a fix for them. The question as a user of the site is whether these flaws are worth the convenience of PayPal, and the fact that it is available on so many gambling sites and that it makes bankrolling so easy. For us the answer is an obvious yes, and that’s coming from someone who has had a lot of dealings with their “customer support”. For others, it might not be such an obvious answer, but the decision is yours to make, just remember that there are few online payment providers out there that can rival the sheer size of PayPal.
