When It Sucks, You Know They Blew It

As I am not happy with PayPal at the moment, I started looking for alternatives. One of the things which come up when you search for "paypal alternatives" in Google is paypalsucks.com. That is a sure sign that they blew their customer relations. And indeed, there are many other people who have complaints against PayPal, and they way they have been treated.
You may be able to get away with more online than in the non-electronic world. When you provide services as text and multimedia, the result is the product, and what you deliver is a perception in the mind of the customer. This is particularly true for user-provided media, where what I provide is very different from what another person will provide. And what they will see is different from what I will see, different from an ebook or a video clip. This is one of the reasons advertisements are so clearly separated from the editorial text. It is not the traditional reason, but I think Google were lucky that advertising is kept separate. This means you can deliver individual advertisements on standardized content, and nobody will react.
What does that have to do with paypalsucks? Well, since money is information, bank accounts are user-provided content. All the work you put in to get the money makes it less likely that you will think about it in the same way as an ebook or a song on iTunes, but I assure you, the work that goes into producing a book is no less strenous than cleaning floors. Well, maybe physically.
Anyway, money is information. So when the users manage the information, it is user-provided content. And when the provider of the service does not manage the content in a way that the users expect, they are doing a bad job. Setting expectations in user-provided content services are the most important thing you can do; this is probably why Google paid so much for YouTube: They had set the expectations for what a video service should be. It is one reason the banks are trying to scare up the price of Facebook: It sets the expectations for what a social network should be. MySpace, Google Plus, and any of a number of different alternatives did not manage to define the expectations. In some different cultures, like China and Japan, other actors were first and maanged to define the expectations for what a social network service should be like. In a few years, someone will figure out a feature which sets another expectation for what a social networking service will be like, and Facebook will be the next Microsoft: Evil empire you can not get away from, but have to build on their crappy APIs.
This is where PayPal is, and that is why PayPal sucks. My bank is very careful to make me read the agreement before I start depositing money there; what they can and can not do with the money in the account is carefully determined by laws and international agreements, and when I want to send money home, I have to jump through a number of hoops to register the account I want to transfer to. They make their money from my keeping it in their account (I can actually get an interest, too, something very rare in Japan where I live). But PayPal makes their money from my moving it out of their account. They make most money from international money transfers, where a user sends money to another and has to change from one currency to another in the process. It creates opportunities to get fees, as well as money from the exchange rate. If you look at the exchange rates of PayPal, you find that they are pretty lousy compared to what you would get in a bank.
Add poor customer service to that. In my bank, I pay for customer service (either through the fees on the account, or on not getting any interest for keeping my money there). But PayPal brags about being free. Which means that when they interact with someone, they have no way of getting paid for it. They want to keep that interaction to a minimum. Unfortunately, that means that they suck at customer service. Keeping costs down means automating as much as possible, and when they have to interact with you they will be perceived as in error, almost whatever they do. In particular, as it would seem from paypalsucks.com, when they actually have done something wrong.
Now I am going to try to make them open my account - despite the extensive interaction I had with them last weekend, they have not yet responded. And they sent me an automated email yesterday asking for the same information I had already sent. Sucks, in my view. Let us see if I can get through to someone who does not suck at PayPal.