Hacker News Reader

Comment by bryanh | Hacker News Reader

Kind of disappointing how stagnant PayPal has become. I know innovators dilemma and all, but it seems like their peak was the ability to properly deal with fraud & security (a sort of a right of passage for all companies that deal with real money). Since then, it just feels like eBay has been milking the cash cow. Shame.

Good luck to Stripe and co, they are doing what PayPal should have been doing all along: iterating the platform.

View on HN

They've expanded into new countries, into mobile with both apps and Square-style card readers, into POS with at-register integrations in store chains, into identity management, into lending... if you think they're stagnant, maybe you haven't been paying attention to them.

https://www.x.com/products

They're also doing new vertical-oriented products for governments, banks and education.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/other-solutions-overview

Whenever I hear terms like "vertical-oriented", I'm reminded of the managers at the big stagnant corporation I used to work at. Those terms sound just like "value proposition", "leveraging assets", and so on. They're not talking to developers or users, which are the people they need to focus on.

Case in point: I wanted to use PayPal to let users buy my apps, went through the x.com site, and quickly dropped it. Way too complex. Now Stripe on the other hand, that's something I'd really like to integrate with my apps.

I'm not saying PayPal can't possibly improve the situation, but they need to start talking to their customers in plain, simple language. What they're doing now is a red flag to me that I've seen in several other places, right before they were obsoleted and fizzled.

Just because they're not iterating in the dev-oriented U.S.-centric C2B space, the least profitable and easiest to solve payment spaces, doesn't mean they aren't innovating. To put things in perspective JANA, arguably the largest payment platform in the world by users, is virtually unknown in Silicon Valley.

But to take one of your examples, they started offering Square style card readers after Square did. So at that point they're just catching up with the market.

Not stagnant, but definitely not innovative.

For the average user & developer, PayPal is the same mess today as it was 5 years ago. That is the stagnation.

That's also called stability. It means that Paypal has been successful enough to still be around after 5 years.

You know what else is stable? Typewriters.

Have you tried purchasing a typewriter lately? The new market is almost nonexistent, and the used market is a mess! This is definitely a market due for disruption!

relevant> http://www.yelp.com/biz/california-typewriter-berkeley

Probably that's the reason why keyboards today are almost of the same layout.

So many alternatives have been proposed but they are no way even close to replacing the qwerty layout.

A well-made typewriter is currently worth more than most startups. Indeed, even a poorly made typewriter is probably more useful than all of the social networking, kickstarter, and faddish clones currently flooding SV; it will certainly provide more value to its user and society.

touche'...it's not the critic that counts...

Paypal never learned how to deal with fraud or security. They simply avoid taking on the responsibility. Paypal decided long ago that it is far more profitable to refund the customer's money 100% of the time than it is to fight credit card fraud. There are pluses and minuses to this system. On one hand, honest buyers can be virtually guaranteed that they won't get ripped off. On the other hand, honest sellers can look forward to having some of their merchandise stolen at some point in the future.

In four years as a PayPal seller we have _not_ had one chargeback. So for us at least it seems that PayPal's fraud detecting system is working just fine.

s/Paypal/The credit card issuers/g

I'm a Paypal employee, so I'm biased, but when the credit card company decides to reverse a payment, Paypal really doesn't have a lot of options.

This would be acceptable excuse if you stopped claiming to be a safe way to conduct online transactions when it's only safe for 1/2 of the people who use it.

>> iterating the platform.

Small companies with small user base predominantly dominated by power technology users can do that.

Its a little unfair to compare a start up with large corp in these issues. The right time will be when stripe will be as big as PayPal is now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com