I have used PayPal for just about two years now and have had no
problems.  Although I admit I have not had to straighten out any
problems either -- knock on wood!  The only thing I don't like about
PayPal is this silly being "Verified" business.  They give you a
spending limit after which your PayPal account won't work until you
get verified.

To be verified you need to give PayPal your bank account information
-- basically giving them carte blanche to your bank account (as if them
having my credit card info was for the last two years wasn't enough).

This is really more information than I care to give out to a company
that I can't go to in person if I have any problems.  Unfortunately my
spending limit is getting rather low and since I feel that I don't
want to do without PayPal I have decided to do like what Ed Gaida
mentioned in his last post and get a separate checking account for
PayPal.

Also I'm going to get a Visa Check card for the new account as well.
Between PayPal and the Visa Check card and only having the amount of
money necessary in the account as any one time, I feel pretty secure
about using the account for on-line transactions.

As an aside: Something to be aware of when you give out your checking
account number, routing number etc.  You really are giving them full
access to your account.  Once you authorize a "direct" transaction to
your checking account they can remove (or credit) pretty much any
amount they want to and other than closing the account there is really
not much your or your bank can do about this.

I learned this the hard way when years ago when I was a member of
Compuserve.  I gave them my checking account information so they could
debit the account each month for their fee.  Problem was they continued
to debit the account even after I ended my association with Compuserve.
To my surprise, the bank said my only option was to close the account.
Maybe laws have been put in place since then to prevent this kind of
abuse but it can still be a sticky mess if someone does remove more
than they are supposed to.

I have noticed that recently that a lot of sellers on eBay are refusing
to accept PayPal as a payment option.  Does anyone have an idea why
this would be?

I had one seller that wouldn't take PayPal with a credit card because
he didn't want to pay the 3%.  (He could have just added enough to the
starting bid to cover the 3% but I guess he just didn't think of that.)
As it turns out I just paid the 3% myself so that I could get the
transaction to move more quickly.

I'd like to hear about anyone else's experiences with PayPal, good
or bad.

Ray Finch
Albuquerque, New Mexico