Paypal is just giving every opportunity for someone else to come and get their market share. Hopefully it will happen sooner rather than later.
If neither Amazon nor Google's brand recognition hasn't convinced folks (buyers or sellers) to start pushing it instead of PayPal for Internet purchases, I can only hope it's because their solutions are equally terrible - otherwise, I have a hard time seeing how a new player will make headway in this space. And I'd really like a new player. :/
It also had an even worse payment flow than paypal. Which is saying something.
You can't ignore early adopters like that so no-one switched.
Also seem to remember it didn't take payments from a lot of countries. Could be wrong.
As a buyer (and not a merchant), I love Paypal because I can have it debit directly from by bank account instead of handing over my credit card information. I hate credit cards, and this combined with Paypal's two-factor authentication gives me some good peace of mind. I haven't seen any other services that provide direct-debit to Australians, and even if they did, they would be useless to me unless they were as ubiquitous as Paypal is. I can use Paypal just about everywhere except for Amazon and O'Reilly. At this point I wouldn't even consider using Amazon or Google Wallet for purchases.
On the other hand, these horror stories have made me very wary of the merchant side of Paypal, and I'd definitely think twice about using them to process payments.
I don't understand this at all. I pay through PayPal via a credit card when a merchant accepts no other form of payment, and if they ever gave me trouble, I trust my credit card provider enough that I don't have to trust PayPal. I wouldn't let PayPal near my bank account, because bank accounts don't have the same level of protection for illegitimate transfers, and PayPal will happily ACH away however much they feel entitled to.
You'd rather give the internet a direct line to your bank account to suck out all your money, vs giving it a number to a credit line (which you can refuse to pay if there's any fraud)? I'd like to see the logic behind this.
eBay would account for some of it. Also, payments is a relatively highly regulated market globally, as evidenced by Stripe trying to expand internationally.
We axed amazon soon after we integrated with them - I gather that now both the API and more importantly the UI are much better, and people can sucessfully use their pre-existing amazon accounts. That would be huge.
Google we still support, but it's usage has plummeted from a low starting place on our site. It'll be dropped on the next rev of the our UI.
I'm from the Netherlands and if you're a freelancer here you need to provide income statements for 3 years before you can get a credit card.
That meant that until last year I couldn't buy a thing with Google Wallet or Amazon Payments without asking my family for a credit card.
The only thing that worked for me was PayPal (and the iTunes store.)
That's amazing. Also goes to show anyone who tries to talk about "Europe" is making a useless generalization - here in Sweden I easily got two credit cards when I was a student with no income aside from government student loans.
But don't you have VISA/Mastercard debit cards? In Sweden, there are no longer any ATM cards, everyone gets a VISA or MasterCard instead that works in ATM, stores and online.
If you didn't apply or it gets revoked because you were flagged somehow, which happened to me when moving abroad for a year, you end up in the situation I described.
And no, we are still pretty much exclusively ATM based here.
Network effects, name recognition, and forced integration with the only online auction site that matters.