PayPal Acquires card.io
thepaypalblog.com
thepaypalblog.com
>to get the opportunity to work on projects that will accelerate innovation at a scale that’s just not possible at a startup.
Since when have PayPal done anything innovative in the last few years. (I am genuinely interested in answers to this)
* Lowered transaction fees for volume merchants from 2.2% to 1.9%
* Partnered with many of the largest payment gateways to add PayPal to their services
* Introduced PayPal mobile and NFC phone-to-phone payments
* Introduced micropayments
* Introduced two-factor authentication
* Got their European Union banking license and expanded to 100+ countries
* Began offering PayPal Buyer Credit (transactional lines of credit)
* Moved into retail stores, accepting PayPal at credit card terminals in-store
* Began offering a mobile card reader to accept payments into a PayPal account
* Introduced student accounts with parental controls
* Opened their API for development of peer-to-peer payment services
* Introduced virtual, one-time-use credit card numbers
* Began offering merchant gift certificates
* Introduced a "storefront widget" that could be embedded in websites
* Began offering SMS-based authentication
* Began offering a virtual terminal for manually keying in offline/phone orders
* Introduced PayPal Pro and the ability to store payment authorizations you can charge against in the future (i.e. a payment vault with permission controlled by the customer).
And since they are not a "bank" they are not regulated by the same laws as other banks, and credit cards.
Bottom line, they lost my trust, and nothing that you have listed regains that trust for me.
My real merchant account, at a company many startups probably use to accept their payments, was flagged as high risk at one point when a string of chargebacks came in from stolen cards someone used over the course of a month. All my processing was funneled into a reserve account and those funds, thousands of dollars, were held for exactly 180 days (6 months), as that's the window in which chargebacks can still occur from previously processed payments.
If you hold this opinion against PayPal, then you should hold it against the entire credit card processing industry. It stems from the root: Visa and MasterCard's Operating Regulations.
> We may close, suspend, or limit your access to your Account or the PayPal Services, and/or limit access to your funds for up to 180 Days if you violate this Agreement, the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, or any other agreement you enter into with PayPal
-- PayPal User Agreement
Of course, they put a wonderful provision in that agreement you quoted. You can only pursue them in court in the state of California and Nebraska. Ask me how I know.
Is that how a bank would act? I don't think so.
As for restricting venue, yes, that's also something banks would do. It's a standard term in most contracts, let alone most merchant service agreements. Here's the agreement for First Data, one of the world's largest merchant account providers. It's also the same agreement you sign for Intuit Merchant Services. You've probably heard of Intuit; QuickBooks, Quicken, TurboTax, Mint, etc. It restricts venue to Ontario.
http://www.firstdata.com/downloads/international/fdims-1202....
PayPal does not have the ability or authority to steal people's money "for any reason and in any quantity". That's ridiculous. You're spreading lies while admitting not to know how it works anywhere else. We don't do that here on HN.
I wasn't talking about chargebacks.
> PayPal does not have the ability or authority to steal people's money
They have the ability and they couldn't care less about having the authority to do so. Largely, because the majority of their customers can't pursue them in court. They also limit any arbitration to 10K. If you read the user agreement, it's all right there, in black and white.
> You're spreading lies while admitting not to know how it works anywhere else.
I sincerely hope you keep a balance with them. So that you can find out from experience, as I did.
You've obviously had a bad experience with them. That sucks, really. And I won't tell you not to hold a grudge against them for whatever that was. It helps no one to use that as an excuse to claim they haven't innovated as a company in 10 years, that they have unlimited rights to steal, that their contract isn't essentially identical to other merchant services agreements, and then to wish ill on me personally for pointing that out.
Where is it?
Not only was it unoriginal, but it was discontinued.
* Can be used on any website that accepts credit cards
* Cannot be used to sign you up for a subscription through scams or hidden terms
* Cannot be charged more than the amount you intended to spend
* Can be set to expire after a short time
* Can be funded by bank transfer, eCheck, credit card or funds through selling items on eBay or your own website
* Is available instantly with just a few clicks
...was absolutely both unique and innovative. It existed nowhere else and offered compelling benefits. And they ran with it for 4 years. Innovative does not mean guaranteed to succeed, be profitable, and stay around forever.
Either you're not very imaginative when considering what it took to create this offering, the risks and costs involved, and what benefits it implied, or you have a petty bias against anything attached to the PayPal name. Either way, you've made no point.
Paypal was not the first to invent disposable credit cards.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1017-245428.html
So you were saying?
What I was saying is that you're being petty and your comments were pointless. I'm still saying it. I made that quick list of things PayPal has tried because the parent commenters were "honestly curious" if PayPal has done anything since the eBay acquisition. They clearly have. Picking off a point and going "but that was discontinued" doesn't add a darned thing to the conversation.
Take a moment to think about the fact that you cited something completely un-innovative. Then think about the fact that not only was Paypal 6 years late to the party, but they couldn't even maintain it for more than 4 years.
Thus not only proving whatever extra "innovation" they had for their clone was not very innovative, they also failed on the execution. And to top it off, there are still others offering it.
And if you are going to argue that anything unique is innovative, I have a lollipop attached to wheels with a whistle at the center of the stick to sell you.
Everyone else got the point, the ridiculousness of the implication that the company has been stagnant since the eBay acquisition, while in reality they've pushed every boundary of the original company -- geographically into every continent, web to mobile to brick-and-mortar, peer-to-peer personal into merchant services, mid-ticket to up to volume and down to micropayments, service to platform provider with PayPal X.
The whole original story got 87 votes. My quick comment rebuffing the idea PayPal has been stagnant got over 50. Most people seemed to appreciate the information it conveyed, imperfectly as any top-of-the-head list written in 2 minutes would. Only you felt the need to pull off a bullet point and make quips about it. You missed the point.
It really doesn't matter if the original story got 87 votes, it is not an anti-paypal piece. It has become quite apparent that you are so desperate to win this debate that you can't even make a logical argument.
PayPal's payment volume grew 24% y/o/y to $34 billion' as well.. http://seekingalpha.com/article/513741-ebay-poised-for-paypa.... I hate to admit it, but PayPal is not going anywhere
My only real problem with Dwolla is their iOS app sucks, and their website isn't a whole lot better. But I've had no problems with their actual service, although I've only transferred a few hundred dollars so far.
I’m just shocked at how poor the security of the entire consumer finance system is, if you can accept payment just by taking a photo of someone’s card. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional credit card fraudsters had implemented this technology years ago (except with covert cameras).
A sincere question: what would stop you from photocopying someone’s card and using it to buy goods with this system? At least with Square you need a magnetic barcode, which might act as a very mild deterrent.
EDIT: FYI, I live in Europe, where we’ve had Chip & PIN-verified PoS transactions for a while now. Still not the best security, but at least it’s no longer trivial.
Anybody know the price paid?
IOW, I think they're better than most people give them credit for, and above average among all the big corps whose support I've had to use.
Give me the elite support phone number you've been using. Every time I've called, I get:
* Someone who speaks broken english
* Who can't actually do anything with any of my problems
* And can 9 times out of 10 not pull up my account. Their backend is apparently made out of spit and duct tape.
<mode="rant" intensity="120%">
Fuck these opaque, non-overrideable "risk algorithms". The least you bastards could do is explain to me why you limited my account. And don't tell me I'm a 'risk' either, assholes. I've had an account with you in good standing for over 10 years, stop treating me like i'm some random you've never dealt with, put your fingers on the keyboard, and remove these idiotic limits. Pricks.
</mode>
888-221-1161. Spend over $5k/yr and you get premium phone support via PayPal Advantage.
Never understood this complaint. I think you meant the second point rather than the first one really - you get the wrong broken-English speaking people. For some time I was the person who could actually do something about problems, but the support team was staffed by 100% British people. And believe me, my spoken English was very broken.
Because when you have an issue, moreso an urgent one, the last thing you want to be doing is repeating yourself and asking the other guy to repeat themselves many times. Misunderstandings at that level could at the very least lose you access to your account.
There's a reason I've taken to using TTY service to deal with companies where ever possible, it completely eliminates that ambiguity.
No, no no no no, no, HELL no. Square is one of Paypal's only real competitors. And a real competitor is what Paypal needs to fix their horrid UI and customer service.
b) That sounds like a poor metric for sophistication. I remember someone mentioning (maybe patio11) that company.com/blog was better from a SEO perspective than a separate subdomain. Maybe they're showing more sophistication than you think?