The time value of money is a basic and powerful business factor. As a new user of PayPal services, the "withdrawal options" made available by PayPal seem to be designed to increase the time delay between when PayPal receives payment from a buyer and when it is distributed to the seller. The 3 options are: 1. Give PayPal details of your bank account, 2. Expect a check sent my postal mail after 3 weeks or sign up for PayPal credit card.
None of these are acceptable to me for the following reasons.
Re option 1: given the many instances of hackers stealing financial information from large companies who probably have tried hard to protect their information, I am unwilling to accept the inherent risk of giving PayPal my bank account information.
Re option 2: This long delay in sending funds to the seller puts the seller at unfair risk. My buyer is understandably unwilling to wait at least a month to receive the item he bought. Yet I am reluctant to send the item before receiving trustable payment. Since both buyer and seller are unknown to each other and separated geographically, the 3rd party intermediary should be a" trust enabler." But I am dismayed at the apparently large amount of complaining on the PayPal Forum about receiving payments from PayPal.
Re option 3: I do not want another credit card and will not accept PayPal trying to force me to sign up for one in order to receive funds promptly. That's just another way of manipulating their customers and I resent it. I don;t see any reason they couldn't credit my existing American Express card immediately upon receiving the buyer's payment. Surely PayPal is a big enough company to work out a smooth process with all the big credit card companies.
So I am a disappointed first time user who has found the process of using PayPal to be very complex and full of disappointments. Even the incomplete, and I would say misleading, description provided by PayPal in its tutorial for new users seems deliberately vague. Only late in the process of using PayPal after the item had been sold on eBay did I discover the limitations imposed on withdrawal of the money I had earned. PayPal definitely appears to be delaying and complicating the process to increase the "float" on the money they hold for sellers. Shoddy business practice.
