Paypal was own by Ebay from 2002 til 2015 when it was spun off. It has since then been a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ
I have never seen a paypal option on AliExpress. I used my Visa and four days later somebody tried to buy some sports shoes with my card number. My credit union caught it froze the card.
Very good.
In Hungary, if this kind of Ali page comes in at all, the PayPal option vanishes in the moment you log in.
This could be the case with other countries, and as the others wrote, with some sellers also.
I can see and use the paypal option, but the fees are not clear. For cheaper items I have to pay a paypal fee of 0.8$ per transaction. More expensive items are several dollars extra, which is too high in my opinion.
It’s great that you’ve never had an issue and I often have to give out my card number as well, but Target lost like 70 million card numbers a few years back and the problem has continued as stores are individually in charge of the card numbers. Every store that we purchase from thus obtains are real credit/debit card number and typically stores that number in their customer database.
I uncheck the box to “save card” at AliExpress and other stores that offer the option, but in reality this may be meaningless as the card number must be recorded in the transaction record for refund purposes. I seriously doubt that any merchant deletes all digital records of the number after receiving payment, even if they do not “store” the number as a payment option in your user account.
I’ve had multiple instances of credit card fraud ranging in scale from local to international. I suspect that AliExpress is doing its best to protect consumer payment information, but each store that has your card number is a threat vector. Target was not a special case; all merchants are vulnerable.
Some cards offer one-time, “virtual” numbers which you generate and give to merchants as needed. I highly recommend using this option, if available. I used this approach for awhile, but the company abandoned the software and the feature hasn’t worked (for me) in many years. Virtual numbers confuse places like Amazon, however, which “automatically” store each and every card number that you enter and offers them as payment option during future purchases.
so you trust paypal then?
i don’t…
wle
I trust PayPal.
I've been using them forever, and I haven't had any problems with them.
RobertB, The paypal option never appears on the checkout page where you actually select the payment method.
I use paypal when it's available and that's what i did for my firsts ali buys but even if PP was available on some AE shops, far from all allowed it reducing choice and even with the dealers allowing PP i was not able to combine payment for various shops and AE added (iirc) about 1.5€ fee on each PP transction so i switched to visa and after maybe 30-40 transactions i never had a problem.
I tried to buy a Wuben light on Ali a few days ago, there was no PP option, and after entering all my info and hitting the final button the site logged me out or something… no sale. I gave up.
Send them a message and tell them you want to pay with paypal. Thats what you do with Simon at Convoy. Have done it a dozen or more times.
I had a Visa card that I only ever used on 2 places: Paypal, and AliExpress.
One morning, I got a call from my bank. Someone used my card to buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of stuff from various Ali sites (I’m not sure if that is relevant or not).
Anyway, I got my money back, but it was a bit of a PITA.
I trust that Paypal kept my credit card info more secure than Ali. If Paypal was an option on Ali, I’d definitely use it for the extra security. Credit cards are awful for security. All someone needs is your card info, which every site seems to store. Ali seems to store it insecurely.
it would be great if any of these online shops would offer a tokenized payment solution.
I am not expecting apple pay, but anything like this would be good.
Frankly, these companies are big enough to even become a global issuer.
That’s absolutely fine. Everyone has to decide in whom to trust. I simply want to trust as few companies as practical.
PayPal has lots of incentive to protect your credentials as losing them will cause billions in lawsuits or even possible bankruptcy. We have not yet seen a major customer data breach of Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, or PayPal to my knowledge. That’s why I brought up the local restaurant chain as an example; they don’t have a multi-million-dollar security team hired from deep talent pools.
Target and other stores have the proper incentive, as well, but they are not primarily trust brokers; they are retail outlets and their technical expertise is often less than cutting-edge. Google, PayPal, or another company may lose all our stuff tomorrow, but they all know that such a breach would be severely harmful. The big players have huge targets painted on their backs, for better and worse.
I’ve had a PayPal account since the 1990’s when they first partnered with eBay. I don’t know if they’re trustworthy, but I’ve never lost money with them and they’ve never reported a serious breach of their systems nor has anyone accused them of hiding such a breach. Perhaps I’ve simply not heard about their bad behavior?
My only complaints are with their aggressive tactics, their ridiculous resistance to be regulated as a bank, and that their system repeatedly switched my payment source from credit card to PayPal Credit during 2017.
I have screenshots showing that the credit card was selected for at least one of those transactions, yet I later got statements from PayPal Credit claiming a balance. I was not happy :rage: , but this hasn’t happened in about 2 years. Was it website error or fraud? I don’t know.
Nothing is foolproof and your approach is absolutely fine since you will avoid the harm when PayPal does get breached or misuses our data. Trust is a huge, seemingly intractable, problem in the Internet Era. The almighty block chain has not magically solved that problem.
Have someone send you some bux and then get a PP debit card. Turn off automatic top-off which’d pull bux from a linked card/account. Then, only keep enough bux to cover any purchases you’d expect to make, like, that day. Or only turn it on for a purchase greater than the balance you have (it does it on 10buk increments), then immediately turn it off.
You then use the PP debit card like any other CC/DC.
Anyone then tries to use the PP debit card for bogus charges, it’ll be blocked for ISF, and PP would likely notice it and hopefully lock it.
So now you can use the PPDC as a regular Mastercard/Visa/whatever DC, it’s not able to reach into your real account and is effectively divorced from your account, and the most you could lose is up to 10bux (assuming you don’t keep more on it).
I got nicked for the 80¢ charge once, which to me was still worth it in case the shipment got lost, stolen, otherwise disappeared into the Shenzhen Triangle. But now with the PP DC, not a problem. Usable across the board with no extra charge, and still got that extra level of PP protection.
I’ve been looking into that, so thanks as your info is timely and helpful 
.
Up until recently I used Entropay for pp and aliexpress. Since entropay is now defunct, does anybody have alternative solutions?
Lots of sellers are ditching paypal. Here’s Louis Rossmann on why.
Louis doesn’t offer an alternative. Until there is an alternative who will keep my financial information from getting hacked, I’ll keep using Paypal like I have been for the last 20yrs with no problems, both as a merchant and a customer.
A couple years ago we were on vacation in Europe, when my wife’s card gets declined. CC company stops the card for suspicious purchases. We get home a couple weeks later to find this letter from Prana.
I was somewhat aware of this problem, but did not know about the May 7 change and had not seen the Rossmann video. My awareness of PayPal’s fee structure was from over a decade ago, so I knew that my knowledge was obsolete from a numbers perspective.
If I was a merchant, I would not accept PayPal and this helps explain why many of the AliExpress sellers I’m now seeing are not accepting it. I imagine that May 7 triggered these changes.
Coincidentally, I’ve recently found out that criminals are using PayPal to send donations to some open source projects using stolen accounts or credit cards. Guess what? This costs the recipient, a penniless open source developer, the PayPal fees every time PayPal turns around and refunds the fraudulent charge! In other words, they punish the recipient of the donation as though they were guilty of fraud.
And that was before PayPal changed the 2.9% policy. I’ve even seen claims that people are donating through PayPal with fraudulent accounts on purpose just to drain money from open source developers (or anyone) who the idiots perceive has “wronged” them.
In other words, Louis is dead-right about losers on 4chan doing this just to screw with merchants like him. PayPal is thus culpable in this travesty as their policies have created this form of attack, even if the attackers themselves make no money from the strategy. Basically, PayPal profits from the misfortunes of merchants.
There are no non-PayPal options which have (had) the widespread acceptance of PayPal 
. Regardless, I sincerely hope that this policy change kills PayPal. Keeping their 2.9% for every refund for any reason is simply wrong.
To be fair, however, I do want to admit that PayPal has operated their business with much less overhead than a company like Patreon, which now has hundreds of employees for no obvious reason. How many people does it take to run a website? They surely aren’t hiring people with advanced degrees just answer phones.
Also, PayPal allows me to use my credit card as a payment source with no extra fee. I don’t know how they do this, as credit card companies charge more than 2.9. Some charge 9, which should also be illegal (I’ve hated Discover for decades as they should not exist and would never accept their cards as a merchant).
Let’s be honest. We consumers are pretty stupid, as we now insist upon credit cards that pay us 1-2% “cash back” when it’s our own money they are paying back to us. To get that 1.5% cash back, the card companies have all raised their merchant rates by 3-4!! The card companies make out quite well, but merchants have to charge 3-4 more for their products and services just so we can have 1-2% “cash back”.
Abbot and Costello once did routine where one would trick the other into giving him two 10’s for a 5. Well, it’s not comedy anymore. We’re that stupid. The credit card companies ask for 3-6% extra, give us back 1.5%, and we think we’re financial geniuses. “The card that pays you back.”