Paypal Vs. Credit cards

Posted by admin on Dec 16th 2013

I frequently got this question from friends about which one is safer to use when purchasing online, paypal or credit card. So I would like to share it here with everybody.

Although I work with the sales department of joyfay.com, I am actually buying a lot for the business to run. Generally speaking, I prefer credit card to paypal but this may not have to be your decision. Here is my reasoning:

  1. Credit cards have 180 days to cover your purchase in case anything goes wrong whereas paypal has only 45 days. You may think 45 days is enough but you never know what is going to happen. As a matter of fact, 45 days may not be enough if you are purchasing items from overseas. Even if you are buying from domestic sellers or websites, you may easily find yourself in a situation where you are too busy to open the package. I myself had packages that are not open for two weeks after it is delivered. There are even packages that are returned because I got notices from the carrier but I simply didn’t have time to drive the pickup location and waste half an hour in the line. Occasionally, I didn’t even get the notice and by the time I think it should be delivered, I found it returned based on the tracking status online.
  2. Credit cards have cash back more than paypal does. I am sure you know this already but in case you don’t, you may be surprised how much cashback you can get from your purchases using credit card. Paypal has its own credit card which gives you about 1% back but most of the credit cards beat that. Besides, most credit cards give you lots of opening bonus. Some of them can be enough to buy a return ticket to Las Vegas. You may argue that the balance from paypal can also come from your credit card, in which case you are also getting cash back, however, keep in mind that not everyone is using credit card to fund paypal. If you are using your bank, basically, you got nothing but the chances to get negative balance in your bank and get 35 dollars overdraft fee in your next statement.
  3. Credit cards cover your purchase in more categories than paypal does. I once had an iphone and wanted to unlock it. After some googling I came to a website where it claims to have solution for my system and firmware for 29.95$ and it also claims money back guarantee. Excited by the fact that I may get my iphone to work with T-mobile, I rushed to place an order using paypal because that is the only payment they accept and in minutes I got their package in my email. Needless to say, it did NOT work. It is nothing but the packaged solution of what I could get easily on the internet. I was angry and email them at once. There was no reply after a whole day, business day. Then I tried to open a case from paypal and realized immediately that electronic solution is NOT covered by paypal… Hopefully after reading this, you won’t be the next victim to online spammers.
  4. You may think that credit card information is in danger if your computer gets hacked. Truth is if your computer is hacked, your paypal information is also in danger and you may have more than one credit cards linked with your paypal! And you may even have your bank linked to your paypal. We actually did get lots of transactions from people who stole other’s credit cards. And guess who the victim is? It is us, joyfay.com. Why? Because when the true owner of the credit card realized that they have unauthorized transactions, they filed charge backs and if we ship to an address that is different from the billing address, the credit card company will want the money back. Even if we did ship to the billing address, we will have to pay the shipping to the customer and back to us because the card owner didn’t order it. If ordered through paypal, on the other hand, we got covered by paypal. So either paypal or the credit card owner would be the one to bite the bullet.

Those being said, I still use paypal sometimes because we are getting paid from paypal and we have some balances there to use. I have to admit that it is really handy not having to enter billing information evey time. Again, these are only my personal opinions and please use your own judgment when ordering online and don’t hold me or joyfay.com responsible because of this article you read.
Before I finish, another interesting topic is regardless whether you chose paypal or credit card to purchase with us, we will not even think about your payment method and offer our help and service as much as we can. Recently, we got an email from paypal saying there is a customer tried to open up a case against us but it was turned down because it was over 45 days. We immediately contacted the customer and realized that the customer chose the wrong item because he is using it in Australia. He didn’t see the problem coming after he used it for a while. We offered to exchange the item for him and he never expected us to take responsibility after he saw paypal turned down his request. Well, we said, we were just being reasonable and it has nothing to do with paypal or credit card policies. I hope you find this article useful and feel free to contact us at http://joyfay.com/us/index.php/contacts/ for any related or unrelated questions.