The demise of Paypal support on my site.
(In short, if you REALLY want to use paypal, you can buy my stuff from Art station by following this link: https://aleksey.artstation.com/store )
I know I used to have Paypal, but now I do not. It’s because paypal has introduced some bizarre new policies that they are forcing onto Middle men like Gumroad and other online marketplaces. This makes it very hard to run a shop in EU.
In short if I was to accept paypal payments, i would have to manually find out the address of every customer ( record it) and then issue an invoice with the VAT of that specific customers country. I would also have to maintain my server security much tighter to comply with EU laws about storing sensitive customer information. And then I would have to send that VAT to Poland’s Taxation Authority every month. And file paper work etc.. So massive pain in the *** .
Currently All the security and data collection is handled by Gumroad.com who are very good at their job.
Also as a bonus, paypal are not refunding paypal fees for example. And being terrible at detecting fraud, so people keep buying stuff with stolen paypal accounts and credit cards… And when they reverse these false charges, they still keep the fee’s they collected…
Hopefully one day they’ll fix this. Because generally paypal has provided a great service for many many years. And I like using them myself.
Solutions
Solution1: As an alternative if you are concerned with sharing your credit/debit card ( as you should be). You can use Single use card numbers. First place to check is your bank app. Many banks let you generate temporary card numbers for use in online shops.
Solution 2: If you are in a which has Revolut, sign up with that: https://revolut.com/ . It’s basically like Paypal, it’s free, you can send money to your friends with an email address just like paypal. But it also has debit cards, which are virtual and either single use, or just disposable, which you can refresh/disable as you need them. So you can just generate a new card when you need to make a payment. You can use it anywhere debit cards are accepts ( everywhere).
Also, in general Revolut is just a massive pleasure to use. Expense tracking, stock investment, airport lounges ( haha ), phone/travel insurance, just a tonne of great stuff.
Solution 3: www.Privacy.com For US citizens only. Basically just generates temporary Card numbers to shield your actual details. Same as above.
Solution 4: And lastly if you really can’t sign up to any of those things, Art station still accepts Paypal for now. But it’s slightly more expensive due to higher fee’s. If you don’t see the product you want, just drop me a line and i’ll add it to the shop.
I Really appreciate the time you took to read all this. I hope it helps you in your future internet purchasing life 🙂 Let me know if you have heard of any other similar services in your country, which i can reccomend to my customers.
Cheers,
Aleksey
