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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

If you're based in the USA, if your business is largely with Americans and conducted exclusively in USD, then: yes. You're in luck.

What's that? You're one of the 6.7 billion people who don't live in the USA? You want to conduct business in more than one currency? You're not an American company?

Then guess what: you're still stuck with PayPal.

Nobody seems to get that PayPal's killer feature is not its userbase. It's that it's everywhere and has multi-currency support.

I would very much like to use Stripe or Braintree or whoever there is who doesn't resemble the truly and sincerely Kafkaesque[1] experience of dealing with PayPal. But until I, as an Australian, can do business with foreigners in their currency then Stripe and the like are basically useless to me.

All I can do is lick the windows.

[1]: I'm semi-serious. Read The Trial and tell me it wasn't written about having a PayPal account frozen.

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If you think that the primary problem in payments is technical, maintaining data integrity while bits get shuffled around, then you tend to expect that things like user base, convenience, user experience, aesthetics, etc. will have a big impact on the rising or falling popularity of any particular payment service.

If, on the other hand, you think that the technical problems are just the foundation and the big problems are actually things like regulatory compliance, fraud reduction, reducing cost of payments, and maintaining strong relationships with processors, governments, and banks then the landscape looks a hell of a lot different.

Paypal has already tackled the easy problems, and has been tackling the harder problems a lot better than any of the competition, with the very significant exception of customer service. If you want to trade money between any two individuals on the planet paypal is by far the most likely solution to the problem aside from air mailing gold coins. And paypal spends a hell of a lot more effort on things like detecting and mitigating fraud (and money laundering, and phishing, and so on) and expanding into more countries than most of its competitors. That's why they're still on top.

Well ... yes. I never thought the problems were purely technical.

That doesn't change my simple reality: the only game in town for me, right now, is PayPal.

And boy do they know it.

Yes, I'm agreeing with you. My point is that most people who think "paypal is doomed" probably don't understand the business with any degree of sophistication. Paypal has spent the last decade wriggling into every corner of the global economy, that's not something you can replace with some clever ruby code.

I think I was confusing the global "you" for the personal "you".

Which is why, despite its formal awkwardness, we have the option of the indefinite personal pronoun "one":

"If one thinks the the primary problem in payments is technical [one is mastaken]".

Personally I prefer the less formal compromise of "someone" (or "somebody", "anyone", "anybody" etc. with the choice depending on context and meaning):

""If anyone thinks the the primary problem in payments is technical [they are mistaken]".

I don't think you should have been downvoted.

While one can use 'one', it does as you say have a certain British awkwardness that doesn't endear it to the Australian or American ear.

> I don't think you should have been downvoted.

Deserved because of the typo? One probably shouldn't make such mistakes when discussing grammar!

I suspect though that most down-voted before fully reading and comprehending that in my comment I said exactly what you just repeated - that "one" is correct, but stuffy, and that there are other, better alternatives to "you" when referring to a broader readership.

When you consider that estimated North American internet usage makes up less than 20% of total internet usage[1], I don't think PayPal has anything to worry about for a long time.

They are the almost defacto standard for personal payments online will keep them in the top spot for a long time due to network effects. Without a serious shift in usage, its hard to see that changing any time soon.

As an anecdote, my grandmother passed away last week. Her 86 year old sister back in Germany asked us if we had PayPal this week so she could send flowers for her funeral. It may not be a "hot" company in the US, but its still highly relevant to the vast majority of internet users, even ones that are only just venturing onto the web.

[1] I don't know the actual number as everywhere I've looked suggests between 13% and 15%. I figure less than 20% is a safe bet.

"PayPal has [nothing] to worry about for a long time."

I'd be careful, sometimes these articles are alarmist and over-reacting but a lot of times they predict the downfall of companies years ahead of their demise. Digg, Palm, Kodak, Yahoo, etc... A lot of these companies all display similar patterns right before things start to get bad for them. They stop innovating, they start getting surrounded by competitors, they get too comfortable thinking they're "too big to fail" and have the "network effect".

Look at Palm alone, it was a leader in PDAs and in a few short years it was gone. The internet and technology are changing at extremely fast speeds. One year you're safe, the next year a competitor has taken your market share. It all happens so fast now. Easier to start, easier to implement, easier to set up, and little by little it's no longer hard for your client to switch payment systems.

Digg, Palm, Kodak and Yahoo are poor analogies to PayPal. None of those companies had positions which were defensible against a better technology. PayPal does.

PayPal's barrier to competition isn't technology. It isn't service. It's not network effects.

It's that they've done the infinitely tedious schlep of jumping through thousands and thousands of hoops all over the world to make it possible for me, an Australian, to do business with a person in the UK in USD if that's what I require.

Nobody else can do that unless I arrive with millions of dollars in tow. Nobody else comes close.

I desperately want that to change.

That's not really an insurmountable barrier.

Once someone wins the US market, they'll use their treasure trove to enter other markers and then in a few short years we'll see paypal vanish.

Once someone wins the US market, they'll use their treasure trove to enter other markets

Sorry, reality disagrees.

Hardly any of the american Paypal-competitors give a flying fuck about the rest of the world. And many of them have been around for the better part of a decade.

The would-be gorillas 'Amazon Payments' and 'Google Merchant' are US-only and US/UK respectively.

Notice I said "won" the US market.

Paypal is still completely dominant in the US. Amazon Payments? Google Wallet? They're no where near even proving better than Paypal in local competition.

So you're a startup and your model or base is international — and all you need to do is wait a "few years".

If your model and base are international, you're overreaching.

All startups have to start small and evolve from there. Once you prove your ideas in one market, its easier to duplicate your success in others.

I would not advice a startup to take a lot of funding, then attack the international market initially.

That kind of pre-mature scaling is reminiscent of Webvan.

International might include not in the US.

I presumed you meant international as in more than their home-base nation whatever it may be.

I think it's possible to start a Paypal competitor for just Germany, then grow from there.

But it'd be far more difficult to start a Paypal competitor that targets all of the EU.

Being accepted internationally is not a proprietary technology. It's not something that ONLY PayPal can do. It happens to be something ONLY PayPal does at this moment. But honestly, give Square or Dwolla 7 years and they'll jump on the international bandwagon as well. The benefits are too numerous for anyone in that space to ignore international payments.

Also, BitCoin. I wouldn't even consider it an option for myself for so many reasons but BitCoin is truly international and the only thing that comes close to PayPal at the moment. I'd rather not have to ask the other party to spend 6 and a half hours reading and understand exactly what bitcoin is, how it works, and weather or not they can trust it. Then spending 7 days moving money from Bank Accounts to Dwolla to MtGox. But it is an option. Especially for large sums of money IF it's from people you trust and IF they know how bitcoin works. But that's too many ifs.

Funny enough, I came here to argue more or less the opposite.

In many countries, the standard payment problems have been largely solved locally, at least for the local markets. In the Netherlands, a wide selection of payment providers will give you the ability to receive payment through virtually any method.

Merchant accounts are easy to get, and the most popular local form of payment, iDeal (direct "my bank to your bank" payment), is supported by all banks and can be easily implemented without the need for any payment provider. The vast majority of all only transactions in NL go through iDeal.

Most payment providers also offer multi-currency support, but it's only a very small part of the market that needs that. The use of PayPal is very rare and becoming rarer by the day. It's about as old school as seeing a "made for Netscape" button on a website.

There's only one area where PayPal is easier and more accessible, and that is very low budget private stuff like donations on a small software project. But given the constant horror stories about PayPal, any solution that targets that market effectively will wipe PayPal away in a matter of months. And then PayPal will be history in the Netherlands.

< In many countries, the standard payment problems have been largely solved locally, at least for the local markets. In the Netherlands, a wide selection of payment providers will give you the ability to receive payment through virtually any method.

Is it really? Sometimes I feel the Netherlands is the only country where it's been solved. Who of you live in a country with a satisfying, cheap, standard local payment provider?

In Germany and Finland direct bank transfers are a usable option. They have no fees for the buyer and very low fees for the seller (as a business account holder at an average German bank, you pay 45 cents per transaction regardless of size to receive payments). In Finland, depending on the bank, you don't even have to pay that. This is similar for all eurozone countries. In the UK there are a multitude of local payment providers as well. The real issue is cross-currency, cross-continent payments. There is no simple solution for selling to US customers paying in dollars if the seller is in the EU. The only serious player in that field is paypal.

In Sweden you can either use bank transfer, invoice (provided by Klarna), and I do not think accepting credit card payments is hard either.

Almost no Swedish businesses who target the Swedish market use Paypal. Paypal is mostly use by Swedish companies when they want to target any country in the world (for example Minecraft).

Dealing with the Swedish credit card providers isn't really any nicer than dealing with PayPal, but it feel better to be dealing with a local company in case something goes wrong.

In Europe bank transfers solve the person-person transfers so there's no need for PayPal for those situations, but for small fry accepting credit card payments it's hard to beat.

>Funny enough, I came here to argue more or less the opposite. In many countries, the standard payment problems have been largely solved locally, at least for the local markets.

Well, the same is true for the US --there are worthy PayPal killers there. But it doesn't matter much in a global era. If you want to be able to accept payments from and to everywhere, PayPal is the only game in town.

For an internet business that is not a pizza delivery or a local florist, the Netherlands only solution you describe is a non starter.

> Then guess what: you're still stuck with PayPal.

Another thing is that PayPal works without a credit card in most cases, it can directly withdraw from my bank account.

Exactly. I don't have a credit card, because direct transfers are much more popular here (Poland). Amazon won't accept my debit card nor a direct transfer, that kept me from buying there.

Stripe is quickly adding countries. Have some patience before you copy and paste your rant again.

https://answers.stripe.com/topics/international

Are they?

If you'd read the original article you'd know.

http://pin.net.au

You're welcome.

Thanks. I saw them when it was first discussed and immediately requested an invite.

Unfortunately it still means that I am missing out on dealing with 6.698 billion people in their own currency instead of 6.700 billion.

I seriously can not wait until they either leave beta, or stripe comes to australia. The race is on!

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