6 months ago I was hired to build a guy a website for his wifes chain of dentists offices. I was paid 1.5k upfront and proceeded to build it out, and was a few days away from turning it over to him and receiving the final 1.5k payment. I then got a notification from PayPal that he tried to reverse the original charges.

PayPal contacts me, I show them our chain of emails, and to their credit, they actually took my side. PayPal goes after his card holder, and of course they side with him, so now my PayPal is $1500 in the red because of some fucking asshole who actually owes me $1500.

Fuck freelancing.

My favourite saying immediately came to mind: "You can't polish a turd".

PayPal is the largest turd on the Internet. They could rebrand and relaunch a thousand times and I still wouldn't put my money in their trust. If I were their CEO I would spend less time on my brand, and more time getting my operations sorted.

I find it really strange that they interrupt the checkout flow to offer a Pay It Later option. I have a verified account, with bank account and credit card, and in all my years of e-commerce development experience, I've always worked hard to minimize cart abandonment. And yet, it's central to their cart experience. I suppose the upside of the profit on that feature is greater than the frustration and abandonment factor in even offering it, but it definitely feels like they're veering from their "payment service" brand experience to.. something else.

Which just seems weird. But knowing how EBay operates, they must have data proving otherwise.

Not only has this been out for a while, but it's only the marketing site. The actual "members page" is still out of the 90's.

"We are even better in person"

For a moment, I thought they would be talking about their customer support, but no... ;)

What's new about it? It's been like this for some time now.