As a business owner, I know that I’m going to ruffle some feathers with this announcement.  However, we’re going to do so anyways.  As of today, Cramer Imaging is no longer going to be accepting PayPal as a form of payment.  If you would like to understand our reasons, please read on.

PayPal has been one of those staples of e-commerce.  I’m sure that you’re heard of it or you’ve been living under a rock for 20+ years.  It’s quite ubiquitous.  PayPal’s popularity is one of the reasons why we’re loathe to give up.  However, they have recently added some rather predatory business practices which are not designed to do anything more than generate their company more profit at the expense of many of their customers.

How PayPal Operates

For those unfamiliar with how PayPal operates, here’s what you don’t see as a customer.  I, as a business owner, use PayPal to collect money in exchange for my product/service using their online transaction platform.  They charge me a fee for the privilege and percentage of the overall sales.  This is how they stay in business.  It’s much like how regular banks operate.

If I find that I must refund a customer, PayPal would refund me the percentage so that I could have the money to return to my customers.  (I don’t have unlimited funds available for refunds)  This refund on PayPal’s side was very important to me and running my business with happy customers.

What They Changed Recently

Now, PayPal revised their terms and conditions to say that merchants and business owners, such as myself, will not be receiving any refund from PayPal when it comes to customer refunds.  This means that I can and will lose a significant amount of money each time that I need to issue a refund to a customer.  I’m losing more money by issuing the refund than I was previous to PayPal’s updated terms and conditions.  If a business can’t make money, it stops being in business.

I have one other option for processing a refund which is to pass the cost of what is lost to PayPal on to my customers.  However, I really don’t think that you want to pay a non-refundable fee just for me to process a refund for you.  You want all your money back.  I would too in your shoes.

I find this move by PayPal to be unacceptable for me and my customers.  As a business owner, I count on sales from customers to put food on my table and to pay my bills.  So, I can’t be giving away money needlessly like this and I don’t expect that you can either.

For this reason, I’m dropping PayPal for all online monetary transactions.  This is effective immediately and will continue indefinitely unless and until they remove this predatory practice from their business.  My apologies to everyone for this inconvenience.

Update:

PayPal has officially put this new policy on hold.  However, they have not retracted nor apologized for suggesting they would implement such a predatory practice.  Until such time as they do apologize and retract, we will continue not using their service.