When did PayPal get so slow?
When did paying for things by PayPal get so slow? I recently bought a couple of things off eBay and paid via PayPal. For days after I kept getting these payment reminder emails from eBay, but the website showed the payment as made. On closer inspection PayPal had marked the payment as pending. It seems now rather than doing an instant transfer PayPal uses something called echeque that takes 7-9 business days, that’s almost two weeks! It now takes twice as long as it does to write a real cheque, post it and clear into the seller’s bank account!
What’s really frustrating is that PayPal kept recommended to use a bank account rather than a credit card, or better yet keep money with them. But did they use the funds sitting in my PayPal account first? No. I assume credit card payments can’t be as slow, so I’ll be using them with PayPal in future, or better yet, another payment provider altogether.
Update: It turns out the e-cheque only applies if you don’t have a credit card registered. My credit card had expired, but I didn’t bother updating PayPal because I use my bank account. Once I updated it, the instant transfer option was back.
