PayPal Expands Consumer Protections in Time for Holiday Shopping Season

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--PayPal announced today that it will expand its buyer protections for shoppers just in time for the busy holiday shopping season. Beginning Nov. 1, 2010, shoppers around the world will have expanded buyer protection when they make purchases at the millions of retailers that accept PayPal.

“PayPal is committed to giving customers a safer online experience through privacy, prevention and protection”

The expanded protections will cover shoppers on merchant websites if they don’t receive an item they purchased, or if they receive an item that is significantly different than described by the merchant. PayPal will extend these additional benefits to shoppers in nearly all of the 190 countries* it serves.

“PayPal is committed to giving customers a safer online experience through privacy, prevention and protection,” said Katherine Hutchison, senior director for global risk management at PayPal. “When you use PayPal this holiday shopping season and beyond, you can have peace of mind knowing that we’re offering even more protection if something goes wrong.”

PayPal provides protections for both buyers and sellers in addition to the safeguards that are built into the PayPal system:

• Because PayPal never shares a buyer’s financial information with sellers, privacy is built into the service.
• PayPal provides zero liability for eligible unauthorized transactions on PayPal accounts.
• PayPal has one of the most sophisticated anti-fraud models in the payments industry, which gets smarter and stronger with every transaction that goes through our system – and PayPal has processed billions of transactions in the past 11 years. With this technology, PayPal often detects and stops fraudulent activity the moment it occurs and before it ever reaches our customers.

PayPal has offered buyer protection on eBay (Nasdaq:EBAY) since Oct. 2003 and has steadily increased the coverage it offers. Last year, PayPal began offering purchase protection on merchant sites for select purchases, if the buyer didn’t receive the item. Today, PayPal’s buyer protection policy covers eligible payments on merchant sites if the items are not received by the buyer or when the items arrive but are significantly different from what was described by the merchant.

About PayPal

PayPal is the faster, safer way to pay and get paid online. The service allows members to send money without sharing financial information, with the flexibility to pay using their account balances, bank accounts, credit cards or promotional financing. With more than 87 million active accounts in 190 markets and 24 currencies around the world, PayPal enables global ecommerce. PayPal is an eBay company and is made up of three leading online payment services: the PayPal global payment service, the Payflow Gateway and Bill Me Later. The company's open payment platform, PayPal X, allows developers to build innovative payment applications on multiple platforms and devices. More information about the company can be found at PayPal.com.

PayPal is headquartered in San Jose, California and its international headquarters is located in Singapore.

* PayPal protects shoppers when they don’t receive the items they ordered in all 190 markets where it operates. Beginning Nov. 1, 2010, PayPal will protect shoppers on merchant sites if the item they receive is significantly different than described in all markets except Belgium, Brazil, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Spain.