Hacker News Reader

Comment by somagrand | Hacker News Reader

This is a great question. I assume PayPal is not the answer in this space even though Apple uses them on the iTunes store.

View on HN

Apple also aggregates payments. I use my PayPal account (somehow that lets me avoid sales tax...who knows why...) for iTunes. Typically they'll bill me immediately for the first song (presumably to make sure my PayPal account still works), then they seem to aggregate anywhere from 1 day to 1 week worth of purchases up to about $30 before billing again.

They did this aggregation when I just had my plain old credit card number linked as well, although I don't think they ran the first charge immediately (probably just reserved funds).

I didn't know that iTunes uses PayPal for credit card charges. Do you have a source on this?

Take a look at your payment options in your user account preferences. You'll see a paypal option.

I assumed they only offer PayPal in hopes of bringing PayPal's customers even at the sake of margin.

A big audience to consider with PayPal is teenagers who may not have their own credit card. Parents could set up a PayPal account to let kids purchase things online (Without having access to their CC#). Or if a kid doesn't have a CC, they may use PayPal as a means to order products/services that require a CC. I know when I was in early high school I used PayPal when I didn't have a credit card to order records and cds. That could be why Apple accepts it.

I see, but it's possible that they accept PayPal but don't use them to process the credit card charges. I always wondered how big operations like iTunes do their credit card processing.

Yea definitely. I wouldn't think Apple would use PayPal to process the credit card charges. I was just explaining why they might accept it as a form of payment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com