Sounds reminiscent of Google - where staff gravitate to the teams they want to work on - but "done right", ie: with accountability. On the other hand, I wonder if it produces some of the same problems - who takes responsibility for long term maintenance when everybody's a hero creating bold new things?
Inside PayPal (2010)
51–54 of 54 posts
Re: Inside PayPal (2010)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speaking as a payments industry insider, it's surprising to me, but PayPal payments represent a huge proportion of online payments, and they're on an uptick. I'm not sure why. I mostly use PayPal when there's some kind of promotion that gives me an incentive, such as extra credit card rewards, or a cash back offer. I think a lot of people find it convenient to use PayPal for ecommerce because they don't have to get t…
> (PayPal is) on an uptick. I'm not sure why. One thing PayPal does well is have all the features you 100% depend on, already running well. The UX is kind of terrible, but it's at least all there. As a PayPal purchaser, I can enforce a specific shipping address, or a specific source payment method, change it constantly at will, and the seller mostly can't mess it up (PayPal enforces it on my behalf). I can sign up fo…
Don't forget about PayPal Shipping. That's a killer (hidden) feature that's super easy and gives me options how to ship (UPS, USPS, Fedex).
Re: Inside PayPal (2010)
#53Is there a single scrap of evidence for the efficacy all these anecdotes? Where are the all the downsides?
Re: Inside PayPal (2010)
#54I found this glorification of PayPal a bit befuddling. I use their service myself often, but chiefly because the banking system in the USA is so hideously backwards (more so ten years ago). In Germany for example, if a private party would want to pay some other private or commercial party, they would use a bank-to-bank transfer, which completes in less than 24h. This system was used even before the WWW. I payed the o…
Bank transfers are cheap, but as far as hideously backward goes...
a. Until recently, they took about a day to arrive, or over a weekend. Money sent on Friday would be on the target account by Monday. You can build an economy around that, but every online service that gives you instant processing will be in advantage. There is a lot of scenarios where quick processing of a payment is desirable.
b. Transactions abroad were ridiculously expensive and to some degree still are. I remember sending a payment to Lithuania from Czechia by bank transfer. The original quoted sum was about 30 dollars (in then-Lithuanian currency, Litas), and the fees added up to another 20 dollars. This problem was probably less common in Germany, a big market where you will find domestic providers of about anything, but people in smaller countries were getting ripped off at every foreign transaction. SEPA payment system is helping with that, but the fees have only gone down relatively recently, too. At least where I live.