Paypal lowering fees charged to sellers

Isn’t competition great? Paypal announced today that as of August 2, 2021 it is lowering the fees it deducts from the payments made by buyers to sellers.

The fee reduction is about 15% to 20%, depending on the fee, which means I have just gotten a pay raise from those who donate or subscribe to Behind the Black using PayPal. This does not mean I want everyone to use PayPay. Right now I actually prefer new subscribers use Patreon, simply because it makes me less dependent on PayPay should it decide my commentary is “evil” and must be blacklisted.

The reductions make these fees lower than Paypal’s new competitors, such as Patreon, or from the conservative right, such as David Rubin’s Locals.com and Dan Bongino’s AlignPay. However, I expect them all to quickly drop their fees as well to match PayPal. And as long as PayPal continues to treat its conservative customers like dirt, expect this competition to continue to heat up.

Lowering its price won’t help if PayPal doesn’t stop playing partisan politics. It really has only two options for maintaining its market dominance. Either it can stop acting like a petty authoritarian dictator and canceling conservative vendors, or it can team up with the government to get its competitors banned or shut down. Which do you think it will eventually choose?

Behind the Black supporters can now subscribe or donate using Patreon

While I had been planning to add other options for my readers to support my work in addition to PayPal, today’s blacklist story, “Business that makes American flags blackballed by Paypal, Facebook, and Shopify”, finally forced me to take action.

You can now support Behind the Black by using Patreon. If you go to my website there you will have six options:

Ground support: $3 per month
Orbital support: $5 per month
Interplanetary support: $10 per month
Interstellar support: $20 per month
Intergalactic support: $50 per month

You can also make a one time custom donation of an amount of your choice.

You can still subscribe or donate using the PayPal buttons, but now you have another option. My current subscribers need do nothing, as this addition changes nothing in their PayPal account.

What this does is provide me some future security should PayPal decide to freeze my account because it wants to blackball me. As they say, the best thing a seller can have is two buyers. I now have provided my readers two internet options for supporting my work. Better for me, and better for you!