No Paypal anymore in the asset store?

@Tiles
Again, it sucks for you.
It do not sucks for me!

And like i wrote before this is no thread about how good or bad paypal is.
For me it worked since years and everyone can decide if he/she want to use it or not.
If you do not like it, is it ok for me but just because you do not like paypal is no reason for me to not use it even if i understand your reasons.




The real fact is that unity allowed us to use paypal in the assit store and now without a warning they take this solution away and that is a bad behavior for a company and i myself feel not good treated from them the way this happened.

I can respect that they do not want to use paypal in the future but they can send an email to me and tell me that i have i.e. 14 days left to use paypal and then they take it away. This way i have time to find another solution and can buy what i want in the last 14 days and i have no trouble that way.

This is only my opinion as a customer who wants to buy things in the assit store but if i was a merchant and treated this way i will for sure go somerwhere else if unity will not inform me in front. And to read that they will use paypal in the background further but switch of the solution suddenly in the foreground is a slap in my face.

I like unity a lot and i think they have the best game engine today and also i like the asset store and the concept that is behind it but this is not a respectfull behavior they give us, the customers and merchants.

I alone bought 21 times in this year from the asset store with paypal and spend almost 2.000 "Euro" there and they can not inform me?
They send me every time the newsletter where they can place this information.

If my hairdresser or my baker would treat me that way they will never see me again!

 

Good job Unity, you had a great thing going and you're taking out the convenient way of paying.

I have also seen a drop in sales. So if all this is happening why are you going through with it? I know the people who work for Unity are smart and understand how business works. The economy is already screwed up so why mess with a good thing?

People keep saying there's all these money restrictions with paypal...there won't be any money if you change the payment method. Please listen to the community and use paypal again. They're the ones that pay you, they're you're customers and we're your suppliers. The Asset Store is doing well because of the artists who put a lot of hard work into the content for you to sell (Including myself). Don't mess things up when they "were" doing so well.

Just saying, listen to the community.

 

I understand that some of you are unhappy with the decision. But i don`t really get your level of frustration. It`s not that there is no other way of payment anymore now that Paypal has removed. This is not the end of the world. Paypal had never more than maybe 20%. The rest worked and works with credit cards and bank transfer since eons.

 

What if someone doesnt want to use credit cards?

 

Then there is bank transfer.

 

@Tiles

If that's true than maybe it's not the end of the world, but still I feel like it's a little selfish. Not using paypal does nothing for us, it only benefits them, and takes out a convenient way of paying for the buyers.

But hey, we'll see what happens I hope all goes well and people continue to use the Asset Store. Just because paypal isn't here doesn't mean people should stop buying or selling.

 

Hey sell will decrease of 10% nothing to be alarmed of...
Now we will see if unity staff truly listen to the community feedback or not.

 

Thats why paypal developed the Paypal IPN and PayPal X long ago, so you don't have to go through their frontend if you don't want.
The frontend is for "going through lazy".

I really fail to see how 1999 style attitudes should work out in 2011 and now you step back a decade enforcing purely CCs again although the phishing and theft problems are worse then ever, even hinting a one click system which means that you expect anybody to store their CC data permanentely anywhere after the security breaches at RSA etc the past 12 months ...

I don't see how one click should be going to work anyway as the external browser is required.
You talk about security so you should be aware that nobody is going to enter any CC data into the asset store window anymore. And any halfway intelligent being does not store CC data in 3rd party systems of any kind either without years of trust in the field - which the asset store has definitely not, its not even stable enough as a shopping solution so nobody with a proper mind would offer it any CC data.
So in the end I'm now forced to go out to the browser, copy paste the url into the chrome stealth instance and enter it there ...
Great way to make it significantly more userunfriendly, really ...


the only thing this new system is to me is another 4%+ more expensive as I earn my money through paypal in USD, have to transfer it to bank (> CHF) and then use it on the CC which applies its own currency conversion rate (CHF > USD) + transaction fees on top again.


So from my end ths is a clear request to the devs using the asset store to sell the stuff also through their own pages offering paypal payments.

 

@Tiles

My frustration is i.e that i can not buy the visualizer studio.
It is only here on the asset store.
Yes it could be that it will be available somewhere else in the future but i want to use it on this weekend.
There are other assets that exist only here too.

But i think we have to wait and see what unity will do so i better take my girlfriend and go out

 

I need to buy the HD Skybox Collection and can't. Developer not responding my e-mail and the only market place for tthis asset is asset store. What can I do? that's the question. Sometimes you can not reach the developer.

 

Paypal is not easy to do business with if half your customer base are pirates constantly logging refunds because they know how easy it is to just buy and get your money back with paypal.

I'm sure at some point a middleman service will exist where they buy the goods for you, and you pay them with paypal for a fee.

If you can't buy something because you only have paypal then how are you buying apps on the appstore? how are you dealing with apple? and so on. Did apple suddenly allow paypal without me realising it? if apple isn't worried, then I'm not worried.

 

2dreamora: That official explanation is nonsense and lie. IMHO true reason is, that PayPal really likes to hold bigger amounts of money and some Unity manager didnt like to pay sooner, than he had money from PP on account.

 

its not much harder with CCs, the difference is just that if you as seller are giving a refund on paypal it costs you $0, if you do it on a CC it costs you something like $20 per incident.


And I have CCs and can buy in other places. But the asset store since its introduction has proofen near permanentely that UT is not even able to keep up its service stability. I do NOT intend to give any security relevant data in a permanent form to a service with such a track.
In addition, my monthly appstore payments are in the range of $8, those on the unity asset store are 10-30times higher so the 4% extra fee I've to cover hits much worse, currently with the total instability of the USD its often even more with currency flux of 8% per day and S*** like that (a prob I don't have on the appstore etc cause I pay in CHF there, not USD - nor do I get the international transaction fee cause apple does its business INSIDE the country not outside - thats where paypal will easily go through better with me than any CC, paypal has no notion of country and related stupid punishment fees)

 

Although paypal now have a debit card they offer linked to your account, that i mentioned earlier, i think it is with regret that paypal has been removed from the store.
A few here talk of paypal being this,that and the other, but to be fair ive been with them for 7 years now with my arteria business and never had a single problem. Ive only ever had a handful of chargebacks in this time which is really good going and i got the money back on these from paypal. The only downside to paypal is when this situation happens they do hold your money until they have decided whether the chargeback is fair(i guess they check with the relevant CC card that has been used attached to the paypal account of the customer) - in fact maybe this is why unity have stopped using paypal, due to refunds and chargebacks?

On the whole paypal is great, and i actually prefer this and use this over serveral alternatives i can use.

Steve

 

Credit cards could be normal in USA. But in other countries like Germany it's not usual to have a credit card.

 

That card only exists in the and for USA and UK, you can't get it anywhere else on earth.

I've used paypal for a decade without a problem.


I'm going to see how their solution works out but to me it sounds like a cheap back out in the hope that refund problems get lower cause users no longer can debate stuff with 1 click (but a single phone call), so my hope is that the same amount of refund requests are going to take place cause the 10 times higher effort and the much higher costs for every single refund transaction would negate the use if this really was the reason behind it.

also it will hopefully help on the QA end for the asset store so ut no longer approves S*** on the store that is explicitely going to ask for refunds once posted.

 

Huh? Yes it is. Visa is very common.

 

@hippocoder
I do not say that i only have paypal but this thread is about paypal and unity and if what i have is not supported from unity it do not help even if i can buy on the app store or be a customer of apple.

And like i sayed i can accept the decision from unity but the way they converted it is not right in my opinion.

We as customers and the merchants need time to prepare for such a change too, not only unity.

 

Perhaps it would be best served to hear why unity has done so. The right thing to do in business is give fair warning, which unity in this case failed to do.

I generally support new business initiatives, but I can't help but actually agree with what people are saying in this thread. It must be a bit of a shock as a seller, to see dramatic changes like this when you check the forums in the morning. Personally speaking I prefer to pay with paypal when I purchase goods. I just do, because my paypal account is separate, and tax free with income from various minor sources. It's nice to use that pocket change to purchase goods and services online, and I will prefer to continue paying with paypal where possible.

 

@Tiles: Don't you know people who haven't a Visa Card? I know many people.

 

You can link your app store account right to your paypal account. You have been able to do this since April of this year. The OSX Lion App store allows checkout with paypal as well.

Even apple has had its own share of problems with paypal http://consumerist.com/2011/07/appl...-and-over-again-for-new-operating-system.html

 

Dreamora is right, now its up to UT .. atm. the Asset Store is slow, buggy and for new users nearly impossible to find, plus CC only,it's like they want to get rid of it.
But besides this issues i love Unity

 

Hey, I'm the developer of Visualizer Studio. I just released VIsualizer Studio last week, so unfortunately it is only available on the Unity Asset Store. I was not originally planning on putting it on other stores, or creating my own direct way of selling it, however due to this, and the fact that some people are wanting to use PayPal to pay me for it, I will be setting up other ways to purchase it. At the least, I will release on some other stores, and then look into creating my own website for selling it directly. This just wasn't something that I was expecting to have to do, so it may take some time.

For now, if anyone would like to buy Visualizer Studio, you could email me at AlteredRealityEnt@yahoo.com to request an PayPal invoice to purchase it directly from me. I would then just email the UnityPackage file directly. Unfortunately, I have no other method of purchase setup yet.

Sorry for any inconvenience.

 

Thank you AlteredReality, i just bought it and happy for this solution

 

Asset store just died...

oh well

We can still advertise on the forum! n___n

 

Sure i do. But i know also people who have no mobile phone. Me for example. I would never state that having a mobile phone is uncommon though

Paypal is one method out of many. And i stay with my opinion, it`s not even a good one.

 

If I created an online store, I would never assume that my customers have a mobil phone... I'm joking

I agree with you. But Paypal is a very popular method which is supported by the most online stores. It would be great if Unity supports Paypal additionally

 

Some people are arguing Paypal has many faults but we don´t want to impose Paypal as unique payment method only as an aditional payment option...

 

Well, Unity runs a business, and knows best what is go and what is no go. And when Unity removes Paypal then for good reasons. Maybe also worth a thougth

 

Dunno how many people have had this, but I've had Paypal lock my account because I decided to cancel the purchase halfway through, they did this multiple times. It was a real issue trying to provide them with enough documentation to resolve it, and then having to provide it again after they locked it up afterward for no reason a week after. A lot of the time they tell you its a suspicious activity warning or something like that, however, no email came to me about the warning, I just logged in to my account and had it all locked up. Paypal is a handy resource to pay online, and convenient, I know before I got a credit card I would use it for all my online purchases, however, there was a lot I could not purchase through Paypal, that I now do having better payment methods. I doubt the bottom line here is going to fall out because a few people can't process their e-cheque this way anymore. The reality is, the asset store is a one stop convenient location for me and others to find assets without having to look all over the web, and that's where I'll be starting my searches still

 

Has UT weighed in on this yet? Any explanation as to why they pulled PayPal purchases? I skimmed the posts so if they've already responded my apologies.

 

Yes, they have.

 

Ok, thanks. I missed that post.

 

Not a single time but I have also never raised my fraud rating on purpose (if you jump out of a transaction before agreeing at the end its no problem, if you agree and then try to debate it etc, that will raise your fraud rating - on a CC the same can be done but there its devastating for you cause many stores will afterwards just deny your CC, simple as that, on paypal the acc goes into review to find out whats going on and you get locked out during that but you never get "blindly" rejected)

 

Worth a thought yes.
But so far none was mentioned, the only thing mentioned from nicolas does not justify nor require a leave of paypal as payment system or additional payment system at all as paypal IPN and paypal X exist for a reason.
Also the fees can't be it as credit cards are at least as expensive (averaging it out CCs are significantly more expensive cause CCs have 2.5% - 3.5% transaction fees for the store + massive fees in case a refund has to take place, while paypal is 2.2% - 3.0% for someone of the volume of UT + $0 for refunds)

the only reason I see to back out, aside of the $5 echeque fees from funny german customers with their annoying "bankeinzug" and other countries with similar bank account pullings, is to fight refund requests done that easily thanks to the single click, which seems to be the most reasonable reason behind it, instead of fighting the issue at its root and stop approving S*** that should never have hit the store. If I'm right on this then though the world is not going to change to the good for UT as CCs don't require more than one phone call either and as mentioned before, their refund handling fees are massive (beyond 85% of all items fullprice on the asset store) and UTs saying on resolving them is even smaller than with paypals system.

So for the time being its hard to say whats really behind the decision, but I have some serious doubts its what is mentioned as it happened to fast, too stealthy shady and with too little intend to publically mentione and comment it toward anyone of the 650k affected users and the XXXXX devs feeding the store or in short with such a bad, commonly inacceptable business practice (even apple gives you more upfront warning and apple is already considered the evil itself since the ToS massacre last year) they better had a good reason to be willing to take a major reputation hit on their already "suboptimal" sales platform

 

I've never heard of such a thing with PayPal or any CC I've used. Is this perhaps something unique to the EU?

 

You will not hear of your fraud ratings normally, thats the point of it that you can't predict and estimate "when you end on the gray to black list"
The payment processors and CC companies keep lists of users that ask for refund or worse, contact their CC company to cancel a payment and shady S*** like that. Also those doing so claiming their details were stolen.

Its rare that you get auto denied, only know of 2 cases / persons where it happened, thats true though.
Often the handling in such a case then ends in "you must manually verify the transaction", which though can lead to it just not working without you ever knowing why. Technically your CC company should phone you and ask you if you issued the order and then approve it towards the store while the payment remains "pending" there. Thats a thing I've seen many times

 

I just went to purchase something, and the PayPal button is back for me..

 

I just made a purchase, and it wasn't their for me. I think I'm fine with the new system personally. At first, my fear was that we would be forced to pay with some second-rate processor, like "world pay", or something. But using a real gateway through BOA is as secure as we're going to get.

 

@Dreamora - I just did a google for more info on this "fraud rating" but didn't find anything. I've never heard of this, do you have a source where I can learn more?

I'm not sure I'm following you here either. When I get a payment notification from PayPal I'm told whether the buyer is "verified" or not and if the transaction is done with an eCheck when the monies will clear (otherwise the money is typically cleared immediately). I've never been given any other rating on the buyer, nor can I find any such information about my account. A "verified" buyer simply means that they've verified a bank account through PayPal and the ship to address is the same as the one on record at that bank.

 

I've never postphoned anything either, but I'm also not offering any refunds unless the buyer can proof that the software does not do the advertised work as all sales are final (I've never had a single case of fraud though in the 3+ years I've been selling it). I'm not operating under US or EU laws and don't have to offer happy refunding. And on top of that I didn't have a chance for either of it as my patcher tech hasn't been bought in quite a while.
As such its well possible something changed or that I back then potentially also missinterpreted part of the informations I got.
Searching for anything related to PayPal anywhere normally does not help much, the paypal documentation is crap at best and useless crap normally as it commonly applies to Paypal USA which affects US and UK users only. The rest runs under Paypal Singapore where various capabilities aren't available at all.

 

I'm in the same situation than Dreamora and I'm not willing to expend my hard earned money in those transaction fees. Of course I will continue buying in the Asset Store, but I'll always try to contact the developer first to ask him if he would accept a Paypal payment. I know that business is business and Unity Team has taken the best decision for them... but as it isn't the best decision for me (the customer), I'll only buy in the Asset Store if I'm not able to purchase the asset directly from the author. Hopefully, the number of sales would decrease after dropping Paypal support and they will have to support Paypal again... if not, it isn't the end of the world, it's only business

 

Yes but I'm living by the business, if I'm required to get a specific addon for a job and can only do so on the store, then thats a problem and one that I'm not going to sit by silently logically as the economic situation thanks to EUR and USD freefall currencies (my income basically dropped by over 35% since summer 2010 just due to the total drop of value of USD, GBP and EUR) and many others bound to it is bad enough for me already without wasting another 5%+ on "gimmicks"

 

Yes, I understand you because I'm in the same situation: I'm paid in dollars using Paypal and because of the currency exchange, my incomes have decreased a lot... and of course I'm not willing to lose an additional 5% (or more) in currency exchanges and transaction fees, but I'm confident most developers will be willing to accept Paypal payment even if Unity Team decides to drop support.

For example, if I were selling a product in the Asset Store for $100 I would only earn around $67 (taking into account Paypal fees) for each sale. If somebody wrote an email asking if I would be willing to sell him the same product for $80 outside the Asset Store, I would agree because it would be a win-win situation for both parts. I think that if Unity Team decides not supporting Paypal, the number of sales in the Asset Store will drop because there will be more direct sales outside the Asset Store.

 

Good decision, Paypal is an evil company. And I can't understand people saying "For me it works, so keep it" while they know how Paypal behaves, how they arbitrary screw their customers and break laws at will. Just ignore everything you've heard until it's your turn to be fooled? Strange attitude...

 

The asset store is a great way to unite everyone's asset, so we must find a way to provide paypal support, without losing the asset store.

Would the asset store allow us to provide link to a personal web-store that allows paypal payments only?

They will get the single click sell feature, but also wont make us lose the paypal customers!

What you guys think?

 

Well paypal closed one of my accounts without warning simply because I forgot the password and email. I tried to prove it with documentation but they said I should take the issue to the european court and resolve it there - presumably they realised it wasn't worth my time. It's hardly a great run outfit.

Good for pocket change but I wouldn't entrust my business to it.

 

We aren't asking you to trust Paypal for your business, we only want to have the option of continue using Paypal because it is the most convenient payment method for us and we could use it until now. We aren't trying to force you to use Paypal, but we don't want to be forced to use Credit Card.

 

Unity is all about options.. why not also it the payment aspect.

I would like to see a graph of how much the sales dropped since they left PayPal.

 

Actually it a good idea don't use Pay Pal bloodsuckers.
After all its racist company because if you are not American they will sucks more money from you.

When I am transferring money from Pay Pal account to my bank I am filling that want to kill them.