Paypal and Google checkout

Hi all,

Is Paypal safe?
I could easily find articles about fraudulent transactions of PayPal from google. e.g.
http://www.consumeraffairs.com/online/paypal_fraud.html

What is "Google checkout"? Is it really more safe?

Thanks in advance

The things I've heard about paypal are mainly due to people having stupid passwords like their last name or their dog's name.

If your password is secure (something like !Fed3SD3s_1 is nice and strong) then you should be reasonably safe.

Google checkout allows you to use your google ID to pay for items, and if you wish, the store never gets to know anything other than your name and address (kinda needed for shipping).

i cant say is it safe or not..but every time i have given option, between ShareIt and Paypal, i choose ShareIt...much faster and less headache than PayPal..well..thats my experience with it anyway...

I always use Paypal when available. Like Pertu says having a good password helps.

You also have to be careful of spoof paypal emails you receive which ask you to update your details. If you get one of these emails don't click any links just type www.paypal.com in your browser and go to the paypal website and login from there.

Basically paypal is safe just don't give Nombasi Mafwilekoweno an easy target to take over your account. :)

aye both are probably as safe as the user

when paying in real life with credit or debit cards you sometimes have to worry about skimming (the act of cloning the magnetic strip) with details being able to be written to ANY kind of magnetic strip credit card shaped piece of plastic (as long as its in the same space)
so people could hand over an old orange top up swipe card pretending to be YOUR card and the cashieer in on it will happily accept it as payment

chip and pin help prevent this, as does hiring honest workers, but most racketeers target underpaid employees in overpriced restraunts

another analogy to the phishing emails and easy passwords

when at the hole in the wall/cash point/ATM call it what you will, you dont let anyone near enough to see your pin nor do you say out loud what numbers you are tapping in, so if you wont divuldge cash card info to just anybody why should you be less picky online?

before i got the internet at home via a 3 mobile dongle i would NEVER buy online from a cyber cafe no matter how secure the website was cos i didnt know how secure i was in the network inside the building
now there are a few things i want to buy but im still hesitant, but unfortunatly in the case of anything from BRL i can ONLY buy online

Depends on whether you are the seller or the buyer. If you are a buyer and use a credit card through Paypal, it is very secure. Paypal allows you to charge back your money, if you don't get your product. Even if that fails, the same is likely true for your credit card company.

If you are the seller though, PayPal offers little protection against fraudulent chargebacks.

(Haven't used Google Checkout.)

PayPal has recently become a real bank, so the question is how much you are willing to trust banks. I don't know Google Checkout, and that's because I still have to find an online shop that uses or accepts it. It's like having a Diner's Club credit card - nobody except for a few hotels accepts them. The world speaks Visa and MasterCard (which is the same company anyway).

>Is Paypal safe?

For the buyer it is relatively safe. If you have antivirus, anti malware and don't log into paypal from links in emails etc. you should be safe.

For the seller it can be a horrendous experience. Everything from false chargebacks, false disputes and paypal locking you out of your account etc.

If you are a seller, make sure you READ and UNDERSTAND the terms of service, and be sure to think about the consequences of that TOS.

Do not EVER allow paypal to withdraw from any of your accounts.
Do not ever agree to not being able to dispute a chargeback or withdrawal.

DON'T use your paypal account to hold money in it. ALWAYS withdraw the money in your paypal account immediately when you get them and deposit the right amount you need to pay before paying using paypal.

As for paypal being a bank, yes they purchased a banking license from lichtenstein, which anyone in this forum could do with a few thousand pounds. Don't for a second think that paypal is now a bank, they are still being watched by several countries for unlicensed banking, and paypal would be hard pressed to get a banking license anywhere but Liechtenstein or perhaps panama.

Since everyone mentioned paypal and not Google Checkout, I'll mention the latter. The place that I work for currently has their own shopping kart which is provided by a e-commerce company, which provides our company with all the addresses, credit card data and so on, sufficient to be able to do all of our own billing. The kart system gives us authorizations on the cards and then it's up to us to permanently take out the funds within a timeframe.

Then we also offer the use of Google Checkout. The customer has to sign up with Google and enters their credit card information and addresses into their Google account. In terms of whether someone could hack into that data, is really a matter of how safe Google accounts are. I believe our company hasn't had any problems with it so far. Then Google sends you basic data like what to ship, where to ship it to, and they tell you whether the card is `chargeable`, basically like an authorization. You can then go to your google checkout admin area and request that the cards be charged, which transfers the funds to your bank account or whatever.

Google also handles sending out a preliminary order confirmation email to the customer, telling them that their order is placed and gives them a google order number. The customer can also go to google and log in to request order status, which then sends email to our company saying that such-and-such a person wants to know order status. So then we can email back. Each google customer typically gets an automatically assigned virtual email address, which looks somewhat like a hash-table key. Normally our website generates tracking data for orders and puts that somewhere for customer's to log into our site to get to it, or emails it to them, but this isn't integrated with Google. Also google only has the ability to capture the full authorized amount on the card, you can't do partial captures with might sometimes be desirable. To do partial captures we have to contact the customer directly for their credit card info, since we don't have access to that.

One benefit is return customers (to any site which uses google checkout) don't have to keep typing in their credit card and address information, and since it's all hosted in one place you might consider that safer than giving out information to many websites. I would say only about 10-20% of our orders are from customers who chose to use Google Checkout versus our own shopping kart checkout. But this is for a business making several million dollars per year so it's not as if Google isn't reliable or dependable. There is, however, very minimal customer service support should you need it.

I think I would trust Google Checkout more than Paypal but that's highly biased based on how much spam there is for paypal and sometimes paypal is thought of as a cheap-n-easy solution for companies that aren't big or reliable enough to have a `proper` checkout system.

probably why alot of small 'shops' have popped up over ebay
instead of bidding for something they just have 'buy now for $xx.xx'
some people just dont have the time or know how to set up a shopping cart of their own and ebay does the rest for them
i know you can buy off the shelf programs but as ecommerce is still new punters are still wary of sites theyve never heard of even if they are selling products that they have

Paypal is great if both parties are honest individuals. Never had a problem here at all. Was a but worried when I bought some items from China since you hear bad things. But all went well.

I usually only use paypal with ebay and only bought things on maybe 30 occasions. So maybe I have just been lucky.

I use it to pay other team members on our contract projects too. Works except it takes a while for $1000's to clear and then for Cygnus bank to clear. Wish they had the Paypal debit card in the UK like they do here.

That way you can use paypal wherever a business takes mastercard. So you can buy stuff anywhere whether they take paypal or not.

i posted a cheque to my brother just in time for his birthday
part of it was his bd money and the rest was some bits i wanted for my pc from a shop he goes to a fair bit

an unexpected bill ate most of it so he still owes me for the pc dosh but as he was selling some stuff off ebay and had a paypall account sorted i asked him to buy me a jack daniels nascar jacket from one of the 'shops' it said 20 days for delivery, comming from thialand i think and it arrived in 5 :)
he ordered some of those laser etched figurines from russia (yoda and darth vader) and afaik hes still waiting for them