Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 187 posts

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#111

Post by badclient »

Karunamon wrote: post #96
badclient wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the problem with Paypal are the payment blocks with no notification, the problem is their complete and utter refusal to talk to the customer about it . They have anti-fraud systems. Fine. Fucking let me talk to someone who can put their fingers on the keyboard and get it sorted out without a front page article on Hacker News, Reddit, and The Consumerist to shame them into action.

Very fair point.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#114

Post by Ixiaus »

gilrain wrote: post #67
Ixiaus wrote: 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.

No doubt there have been horror stories coming from PayPal and I wouldn't use them as a payment platform. You also have to realize though that people of all demographics use PayPal and their fraud detection/handling reflects that, I think.

People use PayPal for receiving small illicit drug shipment payments to paying their contractors to recurring payments for their service.

You cannot expect to have a great time on a service that is catering to everyone because the lowest common denominator will always ensure the organization has to be on-top of fraud and illicit activity.

I've been waiting for PayPal to do something to show that they are thinking about their long-term health and position in the market and this acquisition is exactly that. It will be interesting to see how competitors (like Stripe and Balanced) end up for this too!

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#115

Post by jpswade »

If you remember Google Checkout has been scrapped and merchants won’t be able to accept payments after the 20th of November 2013. One of the three companies Google recommended as a replacement payment gateway was in fact Braintree.

http://tamebay.com/2013/09/paypal-to-acquire-braintree-googl...

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#117

Post by sillysaurus2 »

gilrain wrote: post #67
Ixiaus wrote: 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.

avoiding negative PR

They unfroze Mailpile's funds recently. That's a sign of good things.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#118

Post by yogo »

yesplorer wrote: post #92
yogo wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

they built an alternative and ended up at where they are supposed to be alternative to.. that doesn't sound like a big winner to me

I was referring to winning in terms of being a business. Yes we all hate seeing them swallowed by PayPal but at the end of the day it was a business, not some organization trying to do social good.

Re: PayPal Acquires Braintree for $800M

#120

Post by skrish »

Karunamon wrote: post #96
badclient wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't think the problem with Paypal are the payment blocks with no notification, the problem is their complete and utter refusal to talk to the customer about it . They have anti-fraud systems. Fine. Fucking let me talk to someone who can put their fingers on the keyboard and get it sorted out without a front page article on Hacker News, Reddit, and The Consumerist to shame them into action.

Exactly. This is exactly what Braintree was positioning itself against, offering a 'human touch' to every interaction and having a real person to review the details if you need to scale your business et al.

We can only hope PayPal learns something from Braintree & hopefully change them for better or they may end up like PayPal. Only time will tell.

As a business they have done great. So, Congratulations to the entire team at Braintree.

Post reply on HN