What is PayPal? What does PayPal Offer?:

Paypal was founded in 1998 and its sole purpose at the time was to help individuals and businesses with email addresses securely make and receive payments online. Their real time payment solution uses bank accounts and credit cards to fund the purchases and payments of their 100 million account members worldwide. Paypal services are availabe in 55 countries around the world and help Ebay sellers and buyers, Internet businesses and online retailers with transactions. Paypal was acquired by Ebay in 2002 after Ebay saw how many of their users were taking advantage of the Paypal payment method and they wished to ramp up the services beyond their own site. Paypal has a "shop without sharing your financial information" slogan which builds on their privacy campaign. Paypal is free for buyers and sellers of good pay Paypal a small fee for transactions processed through their system. Online businesses used to have many people turn away at checkout time in the payment process after seeing that the site was not secure, but Paypal allows online merchants to accept credit cards on their websites using Paypal.

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Paypal.com lets sellers/businesses accept bank transfers, debit cards, and credit cards for a small fee. There is no setup fee or cancellation fees and transaction rates can be as lows as 1.9% + $.30. Recently Paypal has come across fraud concerns and payment issues that took a while to get resolved which tarnished the image so much that sites that are anti-Paypal sprung up like Paypalsucks.com and Paypaylwarning.com. We will go into those problems in more details below. Having used Paypal sparingly on Ebay auctions that I wanted to bid on and won, it worked just fine. Paypal offers ecommerce solutions like Paypal shopping carts and a Paypal store to help merchants with the checkout process. As a consumer you can now get a Paypal VISA, or Paypal credit card for easier, risk-free online shopping. The clear cut reasons for using Paypal are: it's much faster than sending checks or money orders, you get industry-leading fraud prevention, your financial information is kept both secure and private, Merchant Tools and eBay tools are free to use, it's readily accepted on merchant website and eBay, and payments can be made in 55 countries worldwide. Ebay, the parent company, was flying high until recently when Google stuck their nose into the online payment process (see below).

Paypal vs WorldPay vs Google Checkout:

Google Checkout just launched in the early summer of 2006 as an alternative to Paypal. Google knows that online merchants want to sell more and spend less, which is what their Google Checkout product aims to do. Google has incorporated the Google Checkout product into their Adwords online advertising program so that every $1 you spend on Adwords, you can process $10 in sales for free. For non-Adword merchants, you can use Google Checkout for as low as 2% and $.20 per transaction. They offer online fraud prevention tools and a payment guarantee policy which protects you from chargebacks. Checkout.google.com is where you can find out more details on their new product. Essentially you can enable your website to accept customers using Google Checkout so that they can buy securely from you using a single password and username. Google has dominated the online search industry over the past few years and it appears with this new product enmeshed in their Adwords program, Google Checkout could seriously humble players like Paypal and Worldpay when it comes to online ecommerce solutions. WorldPay is another leader in Internet payment solutions which allows 1000's of businesses to accept payments on the web using phone, fax, or mail. They work with smaller businesses and larger corporations to help them find solutions to online payments and billing needs. What amazes us is that a larger VISA company didn't purchase Paypal or one of it's competitors early on in anticipation of a huge influx of buyers switching from real world retailers to online merchants and retailers where credit card fraud and protection would become issues.

Paypal Problems - Contact PayPal:

When you have a Paypal account, your money is totally controlled by Paypal and not you since they are not a bank. Paypal routinely freezes its customers accounts over chargebacks and other issues and for some time it was nearly impossible to get ahold of them via a phone. With the recent complaints against them a Paypal phone number has been posted on their website for customer support issues. You can contact Paypal at 402-935-2050 or via email from their website. It's funny to me that Paypal takes so much heat for not having contact information and yet Google (another company with very little communication with customers) is getting into the same business of online payment solutions. It may spell bad news for all online costumers who just want an easy and secure way to purchase things online, but at the same time be able to contact their payment processor about chargebacks or fraud concerns without running into a dead end. Let's hope that both Paypal and Google see customer service as a way to differentiate themselves from the other and improve in that area.

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