I bet PayPal thought they skated on this.

Sorry to inform you, Dan Schulman.  (In case you didn’t know, Dan is the CEO of PayPal, among others.)

I may love the concept of your company, but your PayPal warranties are not only worthless- they’re deceitful.

Many of us feel secure buying products on the web and using our PayPal account. After all, this is one way we can protect our credit card data from reaching unscrupulous eyes. (That is, if you believe the promises of PayPal to keep our information secure. I, for one, do agree they do that part of their function well.)

Another reason folks like me use PayPal? They promise to verify vendors that use their services and adjudicate issues that arise between vendor and customer.

It’s that double promise that I have found PayPal to have violated. (Just so you know, it’s not just me. I’ll mention a web-wide effort about this specific vendor and PayPal at the end of this post.)

In late 2019, I decided to purchase a monitor extender for my laptop. (It was called a collapsible triple screen monitor for laptops.)

After all, tax season was coming and my practice demands I have multiple screens. (Right now, I am using my tax computer to prepare this post and I have three monitors running. If I were doing a tax, it would mean that my main screen was the tax program, the one to my left would contain the taxpayer’s data, and the one to my right would have both a spread sheet and a calculator running. In other words, everything I would need to produce a great tax result for my clients.)

So, I bought this screen extender. I wasn’t sure it would be perfect, but would certainly do for when I was meeting with a client at their site, since I would never bring multiple monitors with me. [It turns out this year, I did very little of that- since the Covid-19 pandemic meant I had to be ‘distant’ from my clients. But, that’s a story for another day.]

I expected the device to arrive within about 4 weeks.

At 5 weeks, I wrote the vendor. No answer.

At 6 weeks, I wrote again. No answer.

Time to call in PayPal.

I did. Except I literally had just received a (piece of junk) that I had never ordered. A 5 inch tablet that would cost somewhere between $ 20 and $ 25. So, I told PayPal that I didn’t receive what I ordered and wanted it-desperately. And, that it was possible that the vendor made an error and shipped me something wrong and something infinitely less valuable (both in my needs and for what I paid) by mistake.

And, the vendor refused to respond to PayPal, as well. So, after a few weeks, PayPal refunded me my costs.

Which is when the vendor finally responded to PayPal. Saying they shipped me the device. (It turns out that the P-O-S [I leave it to your deciphering what I am saying] mini-tablet was indeed from them.)

So, 10 days later, PayPal zapped my account.

Upon noticing the hit to my credit card, I wrote to PayPal again, complaining that I ordered a monitor extender, not a tablet. That was not what I ordered and PayPal guarantees customers against bait-and-switch.

Maybe now it a good time to bring up another problem I had with PayPal in the past. I had bought two 2GB USB keys. Only one worked. I wanted a replacement. PayPal adjudicated the case (sort of). Having me send back the defective unit upon which a replacement would be sent.

And, that’s when I learned a valuable piece of data. Companies in China get very, very, very special postage rates. They can ship an item from the middle of China to the East Coast of America for under a buck. (After all, China gets special rates from the world postal commission, since it is a “developing” nation. Yeah, right.) For me to ship 1/2 of the weight they shipped to me for $0.87 was going to cost me $ 11.50. Which is only $ 2 bucks less than the 2GB key cost. But, I shipped the device back. And, NEVER got the replacement. Did PayPal help me get my replacement? Of course, not.

Back to this saga.

PayPal decided that I could get my refund if I shipped the bait-and-switch device back. When I found out that was going to cost me $ 28, I complained to PayPal that I was being penalized for the criminal acts of SHHC International- and that was not the way their guarantee was stated.

PayPal did nothing.  As did I.

But, I promised I was going to notify the world that PayPal’s guarantees are about as truthful as a statement issued from TheDonald.

In the interim- since this post was initially written more than two months ago but delayed so I could transmit vital information about tax season and the Covid-19 pandemic- I found out that there are a slew of complaints about PayPal and SHCC. So much so that there’s a website about this collusion.

My advice- make sure what you are buying never comes from China. And, don’t ever believe PayPal’s warranty claims.

Because they are both full of ….

 

 

 

By the way, today starts National Nurse’s Week.  Considering the work they’ve been doing during the COVID-19 pandemic, we all owe them a world of thanks.  (Interesting how this culminates next Tuesday- on the birthday of Florence Nightingale.)