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Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

Are you in e-commerce? PayPal is a must have for e-commerce. Some companies try to abandon PayPal and see a sharp decline in sales. Being the first digital wallet gave them a first mover advantage that will never go away.

Only chance is enough people start selling online and see how PayPal treats sellers and stop using it as buyers.

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The claim that PayPal is "a must have" for e-commerce is misleading at best - the largest e-commerce sellers largely _don't_ accept PayPal (see, for example, Amazon) - and I would argue that isn't some weird coincidence.

> Some companies try to abandon PayPal and see a sharp decline in sales.

Removing PayPal is going to be way different than not having it in the first place, because you have cultivated a client base that expects to pay with PayPal.

In online music forums one of the frequent requests I see when new VST makers come out is 'when will you support Paypal?'.

The largest sellers aren't a reason to use PayPal. They can be assumed to have their shit together by now and can protect payment details from a breach. But for smaller e-commerce sites I'd never in a million years trust them with direct CC number entry. You need a proxy and in the US PayPal is the only dependable option for payers.

Don’t you have onetime virtual CCs in the US?

I have this on Amex business and it required adding the service. None of my personal credit cards have this.

Amazon accepts Venmo as of a few months ago.

Yeah we are in e-commerce. We've never had PayPal. I don't think many of our customers would know the difference. To them it's just a place to put some credit card details.

We're looking at moving to a much cheaper local alternative (typically 1% transaction fees) https://www.paymark.co.nz/products/online-eftpos/

I don't think PayPal has the same foothold on the market here in NZ.

We have this abomination https://www.polipay.co.nz/ it logs into your online bank account to make payments. I hope people start to realize how terrifying that is.

PayPal’s stronghold in the US is because eBay was one of the first ways to buy things online and using PayPal was the only way to pay. I’m sure PayPal didn’t have that sort of leverage in other countries where online sales grew in other ways.

eBay is going to stop supporting or offering PayPal next year.

I think the narrative is a little different.

eBay got big, and at the beginning you did the usual terrible American mail-order payment methods-- personal cheques and money orders. I can recall getting money orders because they'd usually clear faster and I might get my item in a couple weeks!

PayPal was one of several competitors in the early 2000s, but they were by far the most successful; I suspect this was because they did a lot of "we'll give you and the recipient USD5 as a referral fee" growth hacking.

Eventually, they merged with eBay and the "they're the dominant choice" became "they're the only choice."

Good point. What were the PayPal competitors in the early days?

The one I recall was Citibank's C2IT. They decided to offer an even larger referral bonus (USD 10 IIRC) so some people ran obvious-sham auctions basically advertising "we only take this, and here's the convenient referral link for me right here."

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