Charging extra for any payment method while offering other common ones is not a problem at all. You have to consider the trouble that a massive number of merchants have with paypal. The risk of dealing with something odd is financially relevant. The time spent on conflict resolution (between merchant and paypal that is) consumes time, which delays payments and has a cascading effect on other operations. This time costs money, which many add as a fee for people that want to use paypal.

I don't know a single commercial seller that once offered or still offers paypal payments and doesn't have a horror story that resulted in serious financial and operational trouble for them.

PP could introduce this if they had a good image. Right now it's considered by many to be the ... Oracle of payment processing.

All of these things are fair though.

* Paypal charges the merchant more (in terms of fees in some cases, holding funds, and time wasted dealing with PayPal's nonsense), so why wouldn't they inform customers of this? If you have a loyal user base they would want more of the money to go to the merchant with less friction, not PayPal.

* Paypal is slower/riskier/less customized, etc. Have you done a checkout on PayPal recently where you didn't have a PayPal account? It sucks.

* Disallowing certain items is absolutely necessary. PayPal can (for no reason at all) allow customers to hose the merchant, and often it can be much more annoying to get a refund even when the merchant seems to want to provide one.

So yeah, when the service offered is equal, maybe we can discuss equal treatment, but until then people should be recommending their customer's don't use PayPal if they don't have to. The alternatives are lower cost, easier to use, more customer/merchant friendly, and generally more enjoyable to use.

I've gone my entire life without creating a PayPal account (even when I have to use it as part of the checkout process) and I see no reason to change that now or ever.

It wouldn't be unreasonable for equal treatment to be given if the service you provided was equal. It is not. That's why merchants dissuade its use.

WTF?

So, in your opinion, equal treatment means that you have to sell broadly similar products from different manufacturers at the same price? So, Porsche could require that you sell their cars at the same price as a Fiat, even though you have to buy it from them at a much higher price than what you pay for the Fiat?

How the fuck is it not obvious that paypal gets treated differently because it is fucking different? Do you seriously think that merchants make up such rules arbitrarily? That it's not maybe that paypal is expensive, so they do the only thing that's fair: They charge the person responsible for the increased costs those increased costs? That it's not maybe that paypal lets itself be used for fraud much more easily than other payment methods in some scenarios, so merchants aren't willing to take that additional risk?

All of these things are done because PP has, at some point in the past, screwed over the merchant. Paypal is so bad that at this point, it's not even unreasonable to assume that even a part-time seller has never had a problem with them. The only reason any seller uses them is because the customers prefer it or they don't want to set up their own Stripe integration.

It's blatantly clear that PP existed with nearly no competition for many years.

> I don't see it as unreasonable to ask for equal treatment to be given.

If the service was equal, I doubt you'd need to ask - those discouragements likely only exist because PayPal is a more risky and/or costly payment method for the seller.