Banking & Investment

Alernatives to PayPal System

Very few people on the internet have not heard of Paypal, the ecurrency system based on the US Dollar which offers an alternative to the use of a merchant bank account to process payments on the internet. Their basic service is free and their credit card processing ability is an advantage yet this system has some very serious disadvantages.

Paypal is not a truly international service, full functionality is supported in only a few major countries such as the United States, Great Britain, France and others. Limited functionality where the owner of the account can only make payments is supported in a further list of countries and finally a lot of countries are completely left out providing no capability for receiving or sending payments.

Another very serious disadvantage is that Paypal has the tendency of confiscating funds from merchants who violate its agreement. This tactic is strongly enforced especially for merchants related to the adult industry targetting any online business that is found to be related in anyway to adult traffic. Businesses in this class are not restricted to websites that contain adult content but also branches out to web hosting companies and internet traffic resellers. Not only is the Paypal service for such businesses cancelled but the funds in the account are confiscated.

Finally, anonymity is not respected wth cases of account holders’ identities being revealed to clients. On a final note Paypal is based on the currency of the US Dollar with no appreciation of funds held in such accounts, only an extremely few number of ecurrency exchangers allow the transferring of funds from paypal accounts to offshore gold accounts as they fear the risk of infringing their paypal agreement and having their funds confiscated.

Alternatives

There are quite a few alternatives to Paypal. One choice would be the use of a gold ecurrency out of the large selection in this directory. The only one downside to the use of these systems are applicable to online merchants. An online merchant usually requires the use of credit card processing to collect funds from buyers on the net. The gold ecurrencies do support this feature though usually through a third party.

More Alternatives

With the realisation of Paypal’s weaknesses a lot of alternative services based on the US Dollar have cropped up to fill in the gaps. Providers such as Stormpay and Anypay are truly international and they accept credit cards. In addition to that they have strict privacy and anonymity policies that fullfill where paypal does not. The only disadvantage with such accounts is that they are built on the US Dollar and do not appreciate over time, this can be easily fixed by wiring the US Dollar funds to an offshore gold based account, the transfer to gold accounts in this case is highly tolerated.