A Friendly Warning About Using Paypal for Unity Purchases

I'm posting this just as a friendly warning to others. If you'd like to make a negative comment, please reconsider and move on to better uses of your time. I'm sharing my experience because someone else has surely had it, and if not certainly will.

I have an agreement with Unity to take my payment for Unity Plus subscription each month through Paypal. This is fine and has worked without incident. This morning I chose to make a rather large purchase and place it on my Paypal credit - six months without interest deal. At least, that is what I chose to do. I wanted to go ahead and acquire some assets at this time all at once rather than spreading out my transactions over several months. I clicked on the purchase button and received a message showing me the transaction was successful. So what's the problem?

Problem was that Unity does not accept Paypal credit, and Paypal does not warn the buyer at time of purchase because they've got an agreement with you to use your bank account as an alternate form of funding. In every other store where I've made purchases, Paypal has their little window come up asking which payment funding source I'd prefer to use. And in every other store where I've made purchases, I get to select whether or not I want to pay from my bank account or from Paypal credit. I was not given an option or a warning. Of course, Paypal will do nothing but tell me to stop payment at my bank--which I've elected not to do. And I want to thank Unity for the stress and contention caused by this in my home this morning.

I don't care what your reason is for not accepting Paypal credit. That's your choice. What bothers me is that between the two of you, I had no warning whatsoever that this was going to come out of my bank account directly this morning at point of purchase, and that I find inexcusable and unacceptable. Now, I would have to stop payment at my bank, then try to figure it out between Paypal and Unity after doing so what to do about funding. I am choosing to take the pain this month in my budget, but it will be a long time before I make another purchase like this. I'm warning others because some people might not have an alternative method for covering a large purchase that they believed Paypal credit was going to cover.

As a result, I've decided to cancel my Unity Plus subscription for the present - AFTER I've paid for this month's membership. There's a price for everything, including loyalty in the face of regret.

 

Note that I am not saying I didn't have the credit. I'm saying that Unity wouldn't take it and I was given no warning before this was taken direct from my bank account.

 

Have you tried contacting Unity?

This isn't Unity's fault. This is PayPal's fault. It's their payment processing system therefore it's their job to warn you.

 

Unity Plus is not a pay for a month here / a month there kinda deal.
"no cancellations before your 12 month commitment period has concluded"
Will this month be the end of your 12 month contractual obligation?

Just lettin' you know, if you wern't aware.

 

Yes, this will be the end of my 12 month contract. I'm not a total ignoramus. I'm a guy who made a purchase expecting a choice to be given when none was.

 

Why would unity not accept it? Maybe you just didn't have enought credit so your bank account had to be used.
Also why does it matter if you're paying from paypal or bank account? You're spending the same amount either way.
If you need monkey on the bank account can't you just transfer it from paypal?
I don't get it..

 

This is what I love about posting in forums. Clearly I said I did have the credit.

 

Sorry, i might have missed it. It's a pretty long post.
But still. Can't you move the credit to your bank account?

 

From my previous post:

Note that I am not saying I didn't have the credit. I'm saying that Unity wouldn't take it and I was given no warning before this was taken direct from my bank account.​

 

Does not work like that. Called Paypal. They won't do a thing. Told me to call my bank and stop payment, and they warned me my Paypal would be in the negative from doing so. I said, "Why don't you just take it out of my credit line?" "Because Unity doesn't accept this form of payment there's nothing we can do."

 

I'm not asking for a solution at this point. I am taking the pain, but I'm making sure others hear about it so they don't do something they cannot recover from so easily.

 

Well, I don't see the problem here.

The EULA says
"Unity may make available to you various payment processing methods to facilitate the purchase of Assets from the Unity Asset Store. You agree to abide by any relevant terms of service or other legal agreement, whether with Unity or a third party, that governs your use of a given payment processing method. You agree that Unity reserves the right to add or remove payment processing methods at its sole discretion and without notice to you."

Also, just a side note: you heard out PayPal, you don't care about what Unity Support may have to say and you blame Unity. I don't think it's fair. Although it's your business, so do whatever you want, but I think you haven't been careful enough.

 

Thanks for the needless attack. I still see a problem and need to warn others. If you care to dismiss that, you may do so without saying one word to me. Go ninja someone else.

IF you had read all that I said, you would have seen that I stated that I do not care if Unity refuses to accept Paypal credit. I also said that it was their right to choose. I'm not sure why you felt the need to quote EULA. This is a post to warn others who might have a serious issue if the same thing happens to them.

Plus, I don't recall saying that I didn't hear what Unity support had to say. I never said one word about Unity's side of it, so how would you know what steps I've taken? Whether I have been careful or not is not the point. What is the point is I made a decision based upon past experience with no indication that this one time would be any different. Now, go be self-righteous and judgmental with someone who cares. You just stormed in here like Captain Courageous, told me I have no right to blame Unity, and dismissed my experience as a fellow human being. I don't think you read my post carefully, but when you make a purchase, regardless, it involves you, the people you purchase from, and whatever group transfers the cash--unless you pay in cash.

 

It's not about their right to remove a payment processing method without informing anyone. That has nothing to do with what happened here. It's that I made a purchase expecting the Paypal confirmation window to appear and offer me the option of method of payment and agreeing to the sale, which is what happens every other time I make a purchase using Paypal, and this one time, a rather large sum, it goes directly from my bank account without warning. If you cannot empathize with a fellow human being enough to see why that's a problem or why others might need to be informed, the issue is not mine but yours.

 

Logic's a bugger. Ain't it?

 

So to recap, you still haven't contacted Unity and you'd rather just stop subscribing than get this sorted out, no matter that every other person so far has said that this is PayPal's fault, not Unity's?

If you want to stop subscribing, I don't actually care. But framing this as Unity's problem instead of PayPal's just isn't correct, especially since you haven't contacted them to try to sort it out.

 

For what it's worth I think you did the exactly right thing and in an appropriate tone too. Based on other reports there seems to be a world of needless pain waiting for those who try to do chargebacks or similar in these situations.
Sorry you got burned and thanks for sharing your concern.
Maybe @AndrewAssetStore can do something about making those things clearer for future buyers.

Problems I've had specifically with paypal in my life so far: 0
Problems I've had with buying stuff from the Unity Assetstore using paypal: 1

I've been using paypal for many many years and the Assetstore is the only place where I ever had real trouble with it. Complaints about the Assetstore payment system seem to be plentiful, so I am inclined to believe it's their fault...

 

This might bother me as well, to be honest. I plan my income and expenditures as carefully as I can. I have large automatic payments come from my bank account directly. These are for my rental payments. I also have very specific amounts put away monthly to my IRA and savings accounts. If the money comes out of one's bank account when they didn't expect it, then... have fun dealing with overdraft fees etc.

And at the comment about transferring money from Paypal to a bank account. I'm sure you are aware of the extreme interest involved in using credit as cash? The whole ordeal here isn't life ending. It won't ruin someone's credit by causing a cascade of small issues. It is just a little stress-inducing, and frustrating. I can empathize with the OP.

And @ the comments about Unity not being at fault, and the EULA. It might just be that Unity has done nothing wrong. In fact it definitely sounds like Paypal's fault. But that doesn't mean someone can't complain about their experience in hopes to warn someone else; and maybe there is something Unity can do on their end to assuage any concerns, such as a mention about Paypal credit (if all this is true).

The key is, someone is allowed their opinion. It is not required that they are in some legally right position when they make it. They can say, "Hey, I had a bad experience here... maybe it was my fault... maybe it was your fault. I just want to let people know, and maybe something can be done to prevent anyone else from having this problem." Attacking the post like an Xbox vs Playstation fanboy (as if it is a personal attack on oneself) isn't really clarifying the situation, and where the fault lies. But yes, contacting Unity is the first step. And it does seem like Paypal is at fault here, so contacting them as well is a good idea (which he did, but it seems like reporting it as a bug instead might gain more traction). And representing the issue from a more collaborative direction probably would help too, such as posing the issue as both a warning and a question about who is really to blame - while not necessarily blaming Unity outright.

 

Well, first of all, if you don't want comments on your behavior, don't post it publicly.
Second, please, comment more, you can dig yourself more deep, especially if you start to make fun of other people's choice of nick name. Really? ROFL.
Third, please point out, which statement was "attack", when I said it's your business? Or when I said that I think you weren't careful enough or when I said I don't think it's fair to stop at PayPal and take their word at face value.

I do not know if you heard out Unity, since you haven't mentioned anything about it, you only mentioned, that you initiated your "retaliation" against them, it implies you rest your case and blame Unity whatever your problem is. Simple logic, eh?

But again, you have the right to be upset or stop paying Unity, you can do whatever you want. If you do it publicly, you can count on it that some people (like me for example) will question your judgement if we find it problematic. So deal with it.


---

BTW, just for the sake of this post I tried to buy an asset through asset store. I chose PayPal as a payment method and what AS did is redirected me to PayPal where I could choose between my PayPal payment methods (my PayPal registered CC, my bank account, I do not have PayPal credit card, so I don't know if it would appear in the list, but I think so).
Which means it works for me as it is intended and PayPal (!) gives me the opportunity to choose whatever payment method I want.
Disclaimer: I'm in the United States with US credit card and US bank account.

 

Eww... did we just go there? It's always weird to me when someone makes an emotional post based on feeling let down by a company, and someone else inevitably comes along and quotes the EULA. As if somehow 100 pages of legal and technical loophole jargon trumps being a busy, creative human being who isn't a lawyer.

 

* PayPal is the one that actually selects the account to draw from.
* PayPal is the one that includes the feature where payments will silently be processed from a secondary source where they fail on your primary source (this is a very unusual feature for a payment processor, and not something the merchant has any control over)
* PayPal is the one that displays to the user what their currently selected primary and secondary sources are
* PayPal is the one that actually processes the payment.
* PayPal is the one that created the feature to allow merchants to choose not to take PayPal credit
* PayPal is the one that owns the PayPal credit service.

Unity is just a customer of PayPal and has to assume that all the above is handled correctly by PayPal and communicated properly by PayPal to the PayPal user. I fail to see how Unity has any responsibility in this situation.

 

Well, if he comes here and says: "I'm sad that Unity does not accept PayPal Credit Cards, is there any chance to change this?" or "Hey, I tried to use PayPal credit and something went wrong, what's your experience with it?" - I wouldn't be this trigger happy. But nowadays it seems Unity became the new Microsoft. If somewhere a three-legged sheep was born, Unity is responsible.

And since I actually tried what the OP stated and it worked for me, I guess something else was wrong.

On the top of this, you really should read the EULAs. If you do business, emotion shouldn't be involved. I like Unity, I like what they're doing, but I read every single character of their EULAs, I like to know what I get into.

And it would be beneficial for everyone if we all propagate this behavior, do not fly blind, read the contract you involve yourself. RTFE!

 

Just about every bank out there has some form of overdraft protection. Basically you link a secondary checking account, a savings account, or a credit card to the checking account and any potential overdrafts will first attempt to resolve through one of them before becoming an actual overdraft.

 

Absolutely, I do as well. But at least for mine, if enough of an overdraft occurs, there can still be a fee (just much more reasonable). And may God have mercy on your soul if the overdrafts happen when your linked account is at the credit limit. That happened to me once. Very frustrated. But can only blame myself for it.

 

That would be relevant if the OP was asking whether they could sue Unity, or demanding that Unity compensate them, but this (the thread) is basically a negative review (may or may not be a fair one, depends whether it really was Unity or Paypal at fault), and those are orthogonal to EULAs.

If I go to a restaurant and the food is crappy and bland (but not unsafe to eat), then nothing illegal has occurred - the restaurant made no guarantee that I would enjoy their food. Does that mean I can't write a negative review of said restaurant?

 

Nope. If you go to the restaurant and you failed to ask/read if the restaurant accept your credit or debit card, it is your fault. The restaurant made no guarantee that they accept every single credit and debit card. It is your responsibility to check it.
Why would it be different when it comes to online shopping?

Oh, and then when you had to give them your last cents from your pocket, you stand in the middle of the restaurant and start to loudly criticize them because you have failed to check if you can pay beforehand. This is happening here.

 

EULA doesn't mean anything, the law does, if unity says in the EULA that they will kill your first born if you cant pay the monthly it doesn't matter, it's the law that comes first, so it's actually better to know the law than read the EULA.

 

It's important for companies to accept feedback. It is very reasonable and possible for one to make a mistake, even if the mistake was avoidable had they sought out every word on every page in a web application.

This is all part of website and product design. Most mistakes can be avoided by reading all of the fine print. Some mistakes are avoided by common sense. But that doesn't mean that a customer can't tell the product maker that they had a negative experience. Maybe the customer complains and accuses the company of making a mistake, even though the customer is ultimately at fault. But then, the company realizes, "we could make this simpler, and prevent others from making that same mistake if we move the instructions to a more prominent place, or re-emphasize our instructions."

And is there really any harm in that?

 

"This restaurant doesn't accept credit cards" is a totally valid thing to put in a review, and in fact is something I've seen many times in reviews. Again - legal is not the same as good. If someone charges $10 for a bunch of great models, and someone else charges $100 for a single poorly-made one, those are both 100% legal, but one is obviously a better value than the other, and should get higher reviews.

 

I am confused....did the OP have a credit line with Paypal or did he have credit from selling items that he was using to pay.

I once did almost the exact same thing. I went to Paypal and changed to our business card so the money would come from there and instead, it came from our personal account. Both our personal account and our business account had money so that was not the problem. So I ended up paying for an asset with the wrong card. It was weird....the dot just moved quickly, before I could change it from one account to the other.

Fortunately, we could just move money over so not a big deal.

Did the OP use his line of credit/Paypal credit card for Unity Plus payments every month? It could be that Paypal does not extend payments to for virtual goods because it is impossible to return such items. I do not know, just a guess.

A Paypal credit card sounds dangerous to me. lol Imagine the shoes I could buy!

 

Be that as it may, the OP isn't complaining that Unity or PayPal acted illegally, or that there was deception or negligence or anything of the kind. They're sharing the details of a bad user experience and the impact it has had on them. They've explained why they expected things to work in a certain way, what happened that was counter to their expectations, and the impact that has had on them.

That's pretty useful feedback to get, if you ask me. I love it when people give me that kind of feedback on the systems I work on.

Plus, per the OPs explicitly stated intentions, I'm now better informed about what will happen if I choose PayPal when purchasing from Unity.

 

@CaptainStardog asked about this and was told Unity choose not to accept that form of payment, here.

Edit: For what it's worth, once I've selected PayPal and am going through the PayPal part of the payment process, I expect everything to be strictly between PayPal and myself. I certainly don't expect the store I'm purchasing from to be able to dictate what options are available. Now, I'm no financial transactions expert, so maybe there's good reason that this can happen, but certainly someone should make it clear when that's the case rather than just dropping whole screens that users may reasonably expect to be present.

It isn't just about ticking legal boxes, it's about meeting reasonable customer expectations.

 

Thanks for the heads up.

I've personally always been skeptical of giving pay pal direct access to my bank account. Looks like it will stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Me too. When it comes to managing cash flow, timing is as important as the absolute amount. This is true if you are running a household or if you are running a billion dollar corporation. Paying in cash when you intended to pay on credit can really mess things up.

 

How do you pay freelancers if not with PayPal ? Out of all my freelancers only one used ordinary bank transfers (IBAN). None have offered to invoice

 

I don't know about other people here but when I do work for clients it's always paid via bank to bank wire transfer, never PayPal.

 

It takes several days to transfer and is expensive though, well for international payments at least. Sometimes I need a very small task fixed like rigging a small skinned mesh or something. Only costs maybe 20 USD, a IBAN transfer would add more than 50% on that

 

I'm normally on the other end of the transaction.

 

Maybe check out https://transferwise.com/ and see if it is cheaper in your situation.

 

ah ok, I'm in the EU and most of my freelancers are in Asia so yeah, Paypal works well for that

 

PayPal is best used as an intermediary bank. I almost always make an online purchase through them rather than directly with my bank card since it's far easier to control and limit purchases through them than it is through my actual bank and I've had no problems whatsoever reversing charges with them.

PayPal's cash back when using their business debit is a nice bonus too.

 

+1 for transferwise, I use it all the time both personally (I migrated from the EU to the US so I have to send back money for various reasons) and professionally (paying for work). The best thing is, they deposit the money on a bank account so no need to open a paypal just to receive payment.

 

I think that many people were confused and that resulted in some of the backlash because they thought this was an "easy" problem. When the OP says PayPal Credit, he's not talking about funds in his account. He's talking about the PayPal Credit option which is a flex credit line (like a credit card or loan basically). PayPal offered him no-interest financing for using that line of credit, so he opted to purchase through the asset store. Here's where the crux of the problem is:

If you have funds in your PayPal account, it'll often give you the option of where to pay from. I believe, ff you don't have enough funds, it auto-draws from the bank account you have on file. In this case, the OP expected to be able to choose his PayPal credit line but wasn't presented the option, so he/she bought a bunch of assets expecting to have no interest financing and instead had a big surprise withdrawal from the bank account. Hopefully that clarifies things.

 

So, either Unity or Paypal does not give the option for Paypal credit line for Unity products. I guess I can sort of understand that in this case.

It puts both Unity and Paypal at a risk for for a charge back if the user does not pay the bill. The credit line is very small though, only $250. Maybe the user went above that limit.

 

So I've just finally understood the real problem: He didn't pay attention to where the funds were being drawn from.

It wasn't that he got partway through the thing and found out that he had paid money and would get no product... It was that the money came directly from his bank account and he didn't expect it.

That screen, in the past, has had "paypal credit" greyed out, I'm pretty sure, when it wasn't available. Of course, it had already selected the next option, and you had to pay attention to that.

It would be nice if PayPal notified the user more clearly that they had chosen a non-default payment option, but once again, this is not Unity's fault in any way, shape, or form.

 

Since this was entitled Friendly Warning about Paypal, I feel like I must defend Paypal.

At least for purchases and business use, we have had very good luck with Paypal. They contacted us when a credit card was used on Paypal and even gave us the person who used our account so we could contact the police. They refunded the money immediately. We did not have to wait for months. They were great when selling art at an art fair, very easy to use as a business account.

I prefer not to use my credit cards for purchases online directly, so I am always happy to see the Paypal option.

Also, it is very easy to get Paypal receipts if I need them for taxes or simply to prove I purchased something.

So...the friendly warning is really about watch that button where you choose your payment method. Make sure you check the correct one.

 

Yeah, it totally depends on the size of the job, of course.

 

Same general experience here. Not sure if account type makes a difference but I also use a PayPal business account, not a personal one. I have a feeling that most times when people have issues with disputes and such (not in this particular case), it's because they're using a personal PayPal account.

 

This could be correct but, in the context of receiving feedback (potentially from a customer) there's no way I'd use those words in response.

If a user is paying even casual levels of attention and I don't make sure they're aware of critical things like this then it is at least partially my fault. In an even half-decent design if there's a choice, or a reason to expect a choice, then they shouldn't be able to make a transaction without explicitly telling me where the money is coming from.

Consider that in my design I need to account for things like people who are only semi literate, and people who are vision impaired, and stuff like that.

 

- you handle your money with this "casual attention"? Well, okay. It's your choice.
- also you're handling this whole stuff with "casual attention", we're still on the Unity forum and not on the PayPal's, where it should be. I guess in this case the answer should contain something like "Sorry for the experience, ask PayPal, good day.".

 

Not sure about the OP, but I buy assets from the store all the time and use PayPal credit.
It is automatic and my limit is in the thousands not hundreds.
Maybe I set it up some time ago but not had an issue.
I use PP for many purchases all over the internet.