PayPal Processing.

Hi,

OK, a curious question I know – but being a curious kind of person I am going to ask it. ( as I have never seen it explained here before )

Could you explain the back-end processing that occurs when someone decides to transfer funds from their Linden account to their Pay-Pal account ?

The reason I ask is that everyone seems to be totally OK with the line of “this transaction could take up to 5 working days” as it is seen almost everywhere nowadays when transferring from pay-pal – but so far I have seen nobody question why it takes that long to go in the other direction.

When transferring from pay-pal to a linden account I understand that certain fraud procedures have to be followed and there is a certain delay before releasing the appropriate amount to the account ( If it is in error – or fraudulently processed then you want it stopped before it gets into the system )

But going the other way I do not understand the delay – surely it is case of “press button to confirm” and funds are transferred to pay-pal ?
You already know the amount exists as it is in your own accounting system – any fraud could ( or should have been stopped before it became a creditable transaction ).

The only reasons I can think of that would cause such a delay are that :

1. a) You are processing the amounts manually.
   
2. b) You have a batch system which runs once a week, or so, that processes these transactions.
   

If (A) then surely this is grossly inefficient as a large number of the amounts involved must be in the “below 10US$” range, and costing you more in salary to process than the transaction is actually worth.
If (B) – why weekly – why not every hour ( including weekends – which as we all know is SL’s busiest time )

You see the reasoning behind my question – when I pay someone with pay-pal they get it within 24hrs ( and I am a small fish – I do not deal in millions ) – So why the delay when coming from the Linden Labs account which does deal in millions.

I am sure, as per my intro, an explanation of the back-end processing would go a long way to alleviating my ( and possibly others’ ) curiosity.

Yes, but we're not going to go into detail about that processing. We have no plans at this time to be more transparent with regards to certain business processes that include fraud countermeasures.



It can take up to 5 days business days to process those transactions. That can be due to a number of different factors which I won't enumerate. We strive to keep the average processing time well under 5 business days, but sometimes it can and does take us 5 full business days to completely process a credit.

Cheers,
Lawrence

Too many Lindens here. There can Only Be One!

Excuse me while I go abuse my locking powers on Lawrence and Chris.