chanaleh dot com?

[chanaleh]

PayPal has, among its Merchant Tools, this ever-so-slick new Shopping Cart feature that basically does all the CGI work for you.

All I have to say is: MuffinButtons. Coming soon. ;-)

(Oh yeah, and laurens10, I borrowed your userpic!)

Comments

now I eat humble pie

[bluebythebook.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Ooh! Buttons!

Good luck with your venture.

[navrins]

Word on the web is that Paypal is Evil(TM). I don't know why, but I'm sure you know geekier people than I who do.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Word "on the web"? As in, you've seen/read actual claims of evilness? Or just heard general anti-PayPal digs? I've used it for years, and an awful lot of geeks I trust seem to be fine with it so far.

(Although they have been bought by eBay, which I *am* willing to stipulate is evil.)

the main complaints vs. PayPal

[flinx.livejournal.com]

that I've hard are these:

1. People have been assuming that PayPal functions just like a credit card, in that if the purchaser is defrauded in some way, PayPal will cover the debt and write it off to the insurers. No go. And that's mostly people being stupid and not reading the fine print and realizing that they should be following caveat emptor.

2. PayPal, much like eBay, has been accused of stealing code from numerous smaller parties to use without recompense. Things ranging from the pay mechanics to the graphical interface. I've heard various charges at various times, in everything from web buttle-scutt, up to the BBC News page. I don't know that any of the charges have actually stuck, or if it's merely a case of simultaneous development.

That, of course, it not counting the neo-Luddites who constantly kvetch that PayPal's server security sucks and that hacking and theft of credit-card information is just waiting to happen. *shrug* Not using it myself, I haven't had the chance to test any of the above.

The repuation is deserved.

[cmouse.livejournal.com]

I had also heard that Paypal was evil but wanted to buy a gift for someone that required me to pay with Paypal. I decided to give it a go.

I had somewhat reciently moved (within the last 3 months) and had notified my credit card company and changed my address when I moved. At that time I'd bought numerous things online from other sources sucessfully.

When I signed up for my paypal account everything went fine. When I ordered the item I got a strange error message. Assuming I had made a mistake I checked my cookies settings and tried again and got the same message. Google search showed that this message meant that paypal had decided it would do the following because I had moved reciently:

1. Charge my credit card $4 for each of the two times I tried to order the item because I inconvienced it.
2. Not pay for the item until the next month when I read someone over the phone numbers off my credit card statement to prove I was me.

Wait a minute. This was a gift for a specific time and the individual I was buying from was going to start putting together my when he got the payment. It would take a month. So that was two months and that would be way too late. Not only that, the random stupid charges really angered me.

It took about 4 increasingly angry phone calls to paypal to get the charge off my credit card and to get my account closed. They hung up on me once. I wasted the better part of 2 hours on it. The person I was buying from told me that he hated working with Paypal and had heard simular stories in the past and he accepted a money order from me and I got the book in time.

I use money orders for all my online non-credit card purchases now.

[coraline]

http://www.paypalsucks.com/

[sethg]

I have never had a Paypal account, but after this exchange of mail with them three years ago, I'm not planning to get one, either.

Judging from some of the online purchases I've made from small stores, there seem to be a variety of companies that provide Web front-ends to the credit-card authorization network. (See here, for example.) They would probably cost more than Paypal, but then again, why would you want to turn away any potential customer who doesn't have a Paypal account?

[achinhibitor.livejournal.com]

I love the slogan on that button ("shobbat shalom, mother fucker"). It's a complete ethnic bastardization, a Jewish blessing and a black curse. But it's also an example of the mainstreaming of Jewish culture -- in the old days, Jewish intellectuals were disproportionately the brainpower behind the socializing (socialist-izing) movement in the US. But in recent years, that movement has receded and Jewish culture has assimilated toward the traditional "backwoods" culture of the US, along with the rest of the educated elites. And the backwoods culture is more individualistic, and more tolerant of violence as a practical tool. Really, more like comic books. See http://denbeste.nu/external/Mead01.html for more of the weird story.

[cheesyhill.livejournal.com]

Looks like chanaleh.com is taken, however .org and .net are free. You want to register one of them?