I would like to know what EventBrite's take is on this (they are the ticket management agency this and most events seem to use, the facilitator of the payment to PayPal, and lead generator to PayPal).
The issues PayPal are raising (Events are risky, don't make PayPal much money) are the same for every one of EventBrite's customers.
On their own each event is powerless against the might of PayPal, but in aggregate EventBrite has some leverage against PayPal given the amount of business they send PayPal's way each year.
I am one of the co-founders of Guestlist. Wee are not event close to the same scale as Eventbrite, but I can give some insight.
Of all the events hundreds of events we have hosted we have only ever received one complaint from a purchaser. Somebody was apparently using our service to sell "power leveling" sessions for a game the he never received the service after he paid. The ticket price in this case was $20 I believe.
At the same time we have moved over $700,000 in the last 12 months all through PayPal. $20 is a very small percentage so I don't really see events as a high risk. Of course, EventBrite is much larger and they probably attract more scammers.
We exclusively use PayPal as our payment processor and have yet to run into them closing down somebody's account. Our main trouble with PayPal lies in their terrible interface and people being able to override the pingback url.
They shouldn't be able to override a pingback URL if you're using encrypted URLs. The issue I'm finding is that many shopping carts and libraries aren't using encrypted URLs. :/
I'm founder of StageHQ.com and as Guestlist we're tiny compared to Eventbrite. Anyway in our first 10 months we've served nearly 1M$ in tickets using only PayPal as payment gateway.
In this time we've had some problems regarding people configuring their own Paypal account, Paypal's usability, and other minor issues, but we've not heard about this kind of treatment from any of our customers.
In fact an event with more than 3K attendees celebrated in Paris and collecting +100K€ has been using Stage and Paypal as its unique payment gateway with no major problems. The paypal's behavior detailed by opencamp organizers totally sucks but I can't refer it as usual from our experience.
Our main reason for using Paypal is simplicity. Open a merchant account is far from be an easy or even possible step for many small, casual event organizers. We could provide our own payment gateway but this would probably force us to change our pricing model that currently is a fixed, not percentual, fee of 1$.
The issues PayPal are raising (Events are risky, don't make PayPal much money) are the same for every one of EventBrite's customers.
On their own each event is powerless against the might of PayPal, but in aggregate EventBrite has some leverage against PayPal given the amount of business they send PayPal's way each year.