PayPal, Satispay, cards: an honest guide to online payments

If you carefully read the terms of use of any website, you'll notice that the shortest part is almost always the one dedicated to payments. It's no coincidence: sellers have no desire to explain what happens between the moment you press the button and when the money leaves your account. Yet, that's where the real game is played, much more so than on the product page.

The first thing I look at when paying online is the method the seller asks me to use. If someone insists on an immediate bank transfer to a personal account, or worse, a postal top-up, nine times out of ten something is off. It's not even a matter of trust anymore; it's that those tools, by design, don't provide a real mechanism for reconsideration. Once the money is gone, you're chasing it.

A detail almost no one tells you is that online euro payments between European parties are now almost all instant, and the cost for the bank is close to zero. When someone charges you a small extra fee because "instant payment costs," they're telling you something that hasn't been true for years. It's not dramatic, but it's a good indicator of who you're dealing with.

Two-factor authentication should be active on everything that touches money or identity: your bank, main email, and preferred marketplace account. Even better, a passkey, the latest system and most resistant to phishing attacks. It's a five-minute setup just once, and it removes half of the risks.

If a site asks you to save your card "for convenience," think twice. It's not necessarily a bad idea, but it means you're delegating that responsibility to the party in front of you. When in doubt, I always prefer to enter the data manually each time: I lose ten seconds and relieve myself of the worry of understanding how and where they will be stored.

Credit cards, ironically, are still among the most protective tools we have for an online purchase today. Chargeback, the possibility of requesting a refund in case of a problem, has existed for decades and almost always works. The limitation is that it can take weeks between opening the claim and getting a refund, and not all banks handle it with the same diligence.

Then, of course, something unexpected will still happen occasionally. It's part of the game. But when it does, if you've done your homework beforehand, the problem will be resolved with a few emails and not a police report. That's already a huge victory, even if it doesn't seem like it.