Paypal is good as a consumer. You can buy stuff without giving random sites your card details, and paypal is willing to refund purchases if you have a legitimate issue and the seller refuses to cooperate with you.

My wife placed a large clothing order some months back, but the package got ripped in transit and we only received about a quarter of it. The seller company refused a refund because the tracking data said "delivered", even though I was able to get confirmation from USPS that the package weight in transit lost most of it's weight between two shipping centers. The fact that we placed the order through paypal ended up saving us, we were able to bring them in as a mediator and they got us a refund.

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hamstercat 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Credit cards do the same, no? You can initiate a chargeback.

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lmm 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

After waiting on the line with support for 4 hours and going through a phishing-tastic email flow, sure. (Maybe your credit card company has a better experience, but who wants to reach the point where you find that out?). With PayPal you just push the button.

	▲	yoden 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		My credit card company has a "dispute charge" button in the transaction history. It's one click. Sounds like you should look into a different provider.
	▲	progval 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> who wants to reach the point where you find that out? Enough people to steal 20 billion USD a year according to https://stripe.com/en-fr/resources/more/chargeback-fraud-101

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moritonal 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

A lot of the world doesn't have credit cards.

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mastazi 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

with Paypal I can link either debit or credit card, so I can choose whether or not I'm going into debt for a certain amount.

Chargebacks, at least where I live, are much harder if you paid with a debit card. Paypal refunds are just the same no matter if you used debit or credit.

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gloryjulio 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Paypal has a bad rep from the merchants side. But for the users, it's just more convenient to link paypal email as payment method instead of others. To the consumers there is no difference between paypal, google pay, or apple pay. Paypal is more universal

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gblargg 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I had PayPal side with a clear scammer for almost $5k. PayPal declined, and I also tried leaving negative BBB feedback which I heard can help. In the end I had to do credit card chargebacks, which thankfully succeeded.