Once again I have a premier account with PayPal. Those fuckers will screw you over any way they can. In order to accept credit card payments, you have two choices: upgrade to Premier and be charged 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction, OR maintain your Personal account, pay a higher fee to receive the money, but don’t get charged fees on non-credit card transactions. You can only accept five such payments in a year; after that, you are prompted to upgrade.

Unless, that is, you are selling things on eBay. Then, no matter what, you have to have a Premier account. Now, I’ve been a PayPal member since 2000. When their tiered program debuted a couple of years later, I was automatically upgraded. I thought this was a nice thing to do, and I never lost anything major due to the fees. Then someone paid me something like $400 and I lost $12. I discovered that you can downgrade from Premier to Personal, but you can only do it once. So I did!

But now I’m trying to sell some stuff on eBay, and I was forced to upgrade just now in order to accept the payments. In the past I’ve been able to talk to people and get them to pay with a linked checking account, but I am selling several things at once right now, and I might try to sell more stuff. One time I tried posting an auction that said “please pay with linked checking account” and they closed the auction. So yeah, basically PayPal just hates you and me.