Paypal's ceaseless incompetence
Having dealt with paypal and regular north american financial institutions far more often than I'd care to admit, my expectations of either one being able to successfully do their job with anything but the simplest of parameters are already rather low, and are most accurately represented on a quantum level. Paypal has a fairly consistent history of this, given the fact that I find myself signing up for a 4th (yes, 4th) account today. Why 4? Because apparently implementing something as cryptic as a pull-down box for country selection when adding a shipping address is a concept far beyond their grasp. This isn't even the really complicated stuff, like realizing that the rest of the world has enough trouble remembering the days of paying for something with a check, let alone having a society stuck on it. Or grasping such difficult concepts as an IBAN (my last encounter in a financial institution stateside required not one, but three calls to higher-ups before someone indicated having even _heard_ of a SWIFT code, which is a very different prospect from knowing what your own bank's is, which apparently requires several more levels of elevation).
I could live with 2 accounts. Canada and the US both use a similar system with routing and account numbers, and so adding both of those to the same account and simply tagging each one with a different address seems quite reasonable. The only thing standing in the way of this is that the country selection for each account is static, and there's simply no way to adjust it on a per-address basis. Better yet, as I'm presently in Japan and primarily using a US bank account, the only way to have my shipping address passed along with the proper country is to create a Japanese account, which of course will only deal with bank accounts in Japan. One would imagine that this was not a problem, and that you could simply add a credit or check card to the account to expedite the 3-4 day clearing overhead on dealing with check-based transactions, but no, paypal is one step ahead of you again, by automatically denying a cad that's been attributed to one account and giving a nice dump of legalese regarding to fraud. One would imagine that a basic string comparison of the person's name, shared email addresses, or some other method of identification would suffice, but no. Ok, so perhaps there's the option of removing the card from one account, and temporarily adding it to the other for a transaction. But paypal prohibits that as well, as it simply won't let you deregister the card if it's the _only_ one attributed with the account. It seems like the only way to deal with this is to have a healthy number of cards from various countries, and shuffle them between the accounts before paypal finds some new and creative way to screw the end user. Not to mention, unique email addresses, since you can forget about using the same one in more than one country.
Ultimately I had to transfer from one account to the other and wait for the check clearing time. Simply amazing. And don't even get me started on FDIC or CDIC backing..
I could live with 2 accounts. Canada and the US both use a similar system with routing and account numbers, and so adding both of those to the same account and simply tagging each one with a different address seems quite reasonable. The only thing standing in the way of this is that the country selection for each account is static, and there's simply no way to adjust it on a per-address basis. Better yet, as I'm presently in Japan and primarily using a US bank account, the only way to have my shipping address passed along with the proper country is to create a Japanese account, which of course will only deal with bank accounts in Japan. One would imagine that this was not a problem, and that you could simply add a credit or check card to the account to expedite the 3-4 day clearing overhead on dealing with check-based transactions, but no, paypal is one step ahead of you again, by automatically denying a cad that's been attributed to one account and giving a nice dump of legalese regarding to fraud. One would imagine that a basic string comparison of the person's name, shared email addresses, or some other method of identification would suffice, but no. Ok, so perhaps there's the option of removing the card from one account, and temporarily adding it to the other for a transaction. But paypal prohibits that as well, as it simply won't let you deregister the card if it's the _only_ one attributed with the account. It seems like the only way to deal with this is to have a healthy number of cards from various countries, and shuffle them between the accounts before paypal finds some new and creative way to screw the end user. Not to mention, unique email addresses, since you can forget about using the same one in more than one country.
Ultimately I had to transfer from one account to the other and wait for the check clearing time. Simply amazing. And don't even get me started on FDIC or CDIC backing..