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PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

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Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#81
It's a pity all these "better-than-Paypal" companies only serve US/Canada/sometimes Europe. Paypal owns the whole rest of the world! Maybe they can now help internationalize Braintree instead of imposing their badness onto it. Also sad that you can't sell hair extensions with Braintree :?(

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#82
post #46
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Braintree customer I am a little worried. I went with them for a number of reasons, but one of the big ones was the fact that they're not PayPal.

PayPal likely purchased them because they aspire to be more like Braintree.

Is there any evidence of this? Besides 800m in cash

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#83
"Speaking to RTÉ News in Dublin, Stripe chief executive Patrick Collison said he and brother John have no plans to sell the company. He said they already have experience of selling a company early in their careers and saw what that involves."

http://www.rte.ie/news/business/2013/0903/471900-stripe-laun... The video interviews with Patrick are worth a look too.

Patrick is 24, his brother is even younger. I am with Stripe from the day they launched in Ireland, it was easy to choose them over the likes of Braintree and Paymill who aimed for simplicity but still required quite some formalities. Also, Paymill is Samwer brothers, a turn-off for some entrepreneurs and developers.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#84
post #65
post #55

Boy, everyone is so negative about the purchase on here! Braintree's customer base is far too large at this point for PayPal to just shut it down ; that would be terrible PR because Braintree is critical to many businesses at this point. It's also not that easy to just go rip out one processor for another on a huge legacy code base. PayPal would be making things worse for themselves if they did that and this purchase…

Braintree processes ~11b/year. Paypal ~$145b/y. This year Paypal expects to process on mobile twice as much as Braintree is processing as a whole. The margins in this business are very small, .9% transaction fees on 11b are not that huge. Where Braintree misses the opportunity is gathering better for young startups that are in the early growth phase. 100 EUR monthly minimum on .10c/trx fees is not easy to digest in t…

Where did you hear that Braintree is going to a 100EUR monthly minimum?

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#85
post #67
post #55

Boy, everyone is so negative about the purchase on here! Braintree's customer base is far too large at this point for PayPal to just shut it down ; that would be terrible PR because Braintree is critical to many businesses at this point. It's also not that easy to just go rip out one processor for another on a huge legacy code base. PayPal would be making things worse for themselves if they did that and this purchase…

Yes, and PayPal definitely has a history of not upsetting its customers, avoiding negative PR, and not making things worse for themselves. We can certainly bet on them to handle this acquisition in a reasonable way.

Show me a company working as a purely Internet bank of sorts and I'll show you a company with pissed off customers. Truth is, this business is very hard. For every time Paypal misidentifies a target and blocks their payments, they correctly identify scammers many more times. We tend to think "is it that hard to tell a scammer from blah legit site?". The answer is yes because guess what scammers are thinking everyday when they wake up? They are thinking 'how can we look more like a legit business so our payments go through'.

I say this as someone whose had to go through paypal's painful process several times in over a decade of use.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#86

What is the rational behind this move? From my perspective, Braintree had a good brand ( compared to paypal), locked-in customer base and sizeable cashflow (my conjecture based on their fees). Incumbents and first movers in this industry have a huge advantage over newcomers - so they were not as much at risk from newer start-ups. They were also risk averse in how they accepted new customers . Could they not have rest…

They took on a lot of VC and there is no way that an IPO would have valued Braintree at the level that PayPal did. With the amount of investment they took on, they needed an acquisition of at least 500-750 million to get the 10x return their investors expected.

In short, when you take on enough investment, your options are IPO or acquisition, whatever makes your big investors the happiest.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#87
post #55

Boy, everyone is so negative about the purchase on here! Braintree's customer base is far too large at this point for PayPal to just shut it down ; that would be terrible PR because Braintree is critical to many businesses at this point. It's also not that easy to just go rip out one processor for another on a huge legacy code base. PayPal would be making things worse for themselves if they did that and this purchase…

I definitely agree. Contrary to the negative perceptions, there is a major opportunity to market the BrainTree service to eBay's small to mid-size merchants along with other services as part of a professional ecommerce store-in-a-box approach. eBay can bundle every aspect of the sales funnel from customer acquisition through actual credit card purchase. BrainTree could also be used as a replacement for PayPal Payments Pro.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#88

The big winner here is not Braintree (though all the founders and current investors are to be congratulated) but Stripe. PC & Co, keep at it :)

Right now Braintree is a big winner. They built a great alternative and successfully exited. Longer term it does make things very favorable for Stripe.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#90
post #84
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Braintree processes ~11b/year. Paypal ~$145b/y. This year Paypal expects to process on mobile twice as much as Braintree is processing as a whole. The margins in this business are very small, .9% transaction fees on 11b are not that huge. Where Braintree misses the opportunity is gathering better for young startups that are in the early growth phase. 100 EUR monthly minimum on .10c/trx fees is not easy to digest in t…

Where did you hear that Braintree is going to a 100EUR monthly minimum?

https://www.braintreepayments.com/

"Interchange +.9% + €.10 per transaction. €100 per month minimum • Everything included • No additional fees". This is probably shown only to EU visitors.

I also confirmed this with braintreepayments support and their reply was: "The €100 is a monthly minimum based on a per transaction fee of €0.10. For example, if your first month of transaction charges are €68, you would need to pay an additional €32 to 'top up' the amount. Interchange + 0.90% is not part of the calculation. Only the per transaction fee of €0.10 is used to calculate the €100 monthly minimum."

When I switch the site to "United States" it reads: "2.9% + $.30 per transaction. No additional fees • No minimums • Everything included"

Extremely annoyed by seeing this minimum applied only to the EU countries!

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