Aral Balkan

Following my PayPal nightmare with the Update conference, I decided to create a site to warn future event and conference organizers that using PayPal could be detrimental to the health of their event: ConferencesBurnedByPayPal.tumblr.com.

I also set up a Twitter account – @paypalnightmare – that will tweet new horror stories as event and conference organizers share them with me and as they appear on the site.

If you have organized (or are organizing) a conference/event and have been burned by PayPal for selling tickets, please submit your experiences to the blog.

Comments

• We avoided PayPal after ScotRuby conf were annually burned by them. Must say we'd recommend www.eventbrite.com as a third party ticket vendor and payment processor. Their conferencing web app is really excellent - makes managing tickets, sales, refunds, reporting etc very painless. One thing to note is that you need to contact their support team to arrange a "payment advance scheme" which delivers your funds in fortnightly batches in the months prior to the event, rather than the default (receive all funds 5 days after the event). The support team were genuinely helpful and responsive via email and phone so I don't think this detracts from their overall excellence.

  by Sean on 2011-08-25 08:26:37

• What do you suggest virgin conference organisers to use then? I think it would've been a much better post if alternatives where mentioned. Anyways thanks for the heads-up. Appreciate it!

  by Mohammed Ameen on 2011-09-11 15:49:00

• L...M...B...O! :-D

  by John C. Bland II on 2011-08-24 19:57:16

• I remember when this happened a few years ago to a bunch of web startups. I can't remember the details but a fraud situation had accounts frozen long enough to take some startups under.

  by Mani on 2011-08-24 19:57:52

• Oh and that's for the image not the experience you went through. :-)

  by John C. Bland II on 2011-08-24 19:58:11