posted on November 15, 2001 11:19:48 PM new
Well, sounds nice for a seller, but I think the really big problem here is that buyers do not care that we pay to process paypal. It's really going to be hard to break that momentum. The only way I can see this really working is if they did what paypal did initially, give away money to sign people up. I will look into it, but I think paypal is just getting bigger and bigger. Lately, it seems more than 50% of my customers pay with paypal.
posted on November 15, 2001 11:39:39 PM new
I see paypal as dying. ebay is dealing them out completely in every way they can. You can not use paypal to buy any of the 100 million items on Half.com for instance. If paypal doesn't start up and auction site soon it will be out of business. The buyers don't care if it's Billpoint or paypal or paydirect. If paypal isn't an option then they'll go with Billpoint or whatever is offered. Then all the paypal complainers can cry about a billpoint monopoly and say they miss paypal but it will be too late.
posted on November 15, 2001 11:49:50 PM new
I too think eBay can deal a death blow to Paypal anytime it wants. Check Out and Half.com are geared at cutting out alternatives to eBays credit card payment service.
Ebay would make the whole site like Half.com if it thought for a minute it could get away with it.
posted on November 16, 2001 05:25:41 AM new
I see your point about Ebay trying to encourage use of it's payment system only. However, there are several million users of PayPal on ebay already and Paypal also services the purchase systems of a lot of websites. They provide excellent systems for small websites for people who do not have their own merchant account (we use them on our website). I use PayPal all the time, and my PayPal debit card all the time, all over the Web.
I think if Ebay tried to ban sellers from offering PayPal for auction items there might be some antitrust considerations that would prevent them from making such a move.
Approximately 80 percent of our Ebay sales are paid for through PayPal. That's up from previous years when 50 percent of our buyers paid through PayPal. I don't think Ebay could put them out of business right now, if they could they probably would. They can't because it would expose them to antitrust lawsuits IMHO.
I'm going to start a thread asking for opinions of the c2it service because I'm really interested in signing up for it.
