(TL;DR - +1 this thread if you can think of no good reason PayPal should lock you out of using your credit card to the fullest when you also have a bank account) Dear PayPal, You are a respectable company. You take security seriously. You are innovative. You keep user friendliness and usability in mind. You get almost everything just right. Not the default payment method. First of all, I know that you have spent thousands of dollars in design and development to maximize the usability of your payment flow. You do this, because there is a truth about the checkout process which you understand only too well: Even the slightest hiccup or bump the user faces may deter him from going ahead with his often spontaneous purchase. As a result, every failure in usability WILL and DOES result in a considerable net loss in profit considering the vast number of transactions you process every day. As such, it is imperative that the payment process is as smooth as it can possibly be. Every improvement in this area translates directly into profit. Secondly, you offer support for multiple payment methods. Credit cards and bank accounts of different types. While you take a certain risk with bank drafts, you can generally compensate for those by using credit cards as a back-up method. I'm certain there is higher cost associated with performing credit card transactions as opposed to bank drafts. Now, the current situation: as soon as one of your users ADDS a bank payment method to his account, he is instantly ROBBED of the ability to make smooth payment transactions using his credit card. Suddenly, the only way to perform credit-card payments using paypal involves a painful manual procedure during check-out. THIS LOCK-OUT "FEATURE" IS NOT ADVERTISED WHEN ADDING THE BANK ACCOUNT. Simply removing the bank account is often not an option, never mind that it messes with your status. Your standard response to this when users complain is: "You can simply change the payment method during checkout". This is a **bleep** response. The thousands of dollars invested by you and all your payment processor competitors prove that this process is aweful and utterly undesired. Never mind that it is implemented in a way that makes the process very slow (if you are amazed at this statement because it only takes you "a minute", then you have no clue about what the impact of a minute during checkout is and I advise you to refrain from weighing in). I can only imagine that you have through experimentation and statistics calculated that the cost of disrupting the payment checkout process is just shy of the extra cost to you for credit card transactions. This is not the reason you give us, in fact, there have been many complains about this in these forums, and many more not in these forums, and all you've managed to say on the topic is the useless workaround I already mentioned. That is, you refuse to explain yourself, likely because you don't want to upset the userbase over your greedy decision. It's time you changed this policy. You call it a "default payment method", which implies that alternatives can be set. Make it happen. Stop lying. Start caring about your users: you know you want to. And to all users who read this and can think of no good reason why PayPal should lock you out of being able to use your credit card as naturally as it should be, +1 this thread, comment and spread the word. Company policy is dictatorship, not democracy, but you can still be more than just plebs by using the reply button.
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