eBay finishes PayPal Acquisition

Aidenn writes "As some may remember, eBay was in the process of merging with PayPal. It is finally finished. eBay has information here. news.com has a more complete story."

Comments

Ebay owns them, lets hope service improves

[neoform]

Heres to hoping EBay will finally fix PayPal's terrbile policies when it comes to fraud detection.

Re:Less Competition

[dmoynihan]

As a guy whose website derives 80% of its revenues between Paypal and eBay I'm a little concerned about this merger. One great thing about the soon-to-be-defunct Billpoint service was that you could send an invoice for a "non-auction" item (overseas customers who didn't want to sign up for paypal but still hoped to pay by credit card), a feature I use a couple times a week.

The merchant account thing is getting a little better, though it's still a PITB to set up ("picture of my inventory? I sell digital goods..."), probably bank of america has the best deal currently.

I guess there can only be one Internet money though.

The need for a better cash

[argoff]

IMHO the problems I've heard of for both ebay and paypal only highlight the need for a better digital cash system.

What we need is something that is trustworthy, anonymous (private from the prying eyes of 3rd parties), indenpendent of a government monetary authority or any centralized authority, easy to send and transfer electronicly, and with general predictability and liquidity in value.

for anonymity I was thinking there might be some kind of a scheme where you could reveal the identity of the selling party if you were willing to sacrifice the value of the digital cash they gave you.

Also, perhaps there's some type of a need, like computing cycles, storage, or some type of computing service that would have market value that could be actuated by this form of digital cash.

any thoughts?

E-Bay - Grey Commerce Beast

[szyzyg]

Speaking of which - I wonder if e-Bay will ever become big enough to start standing up to those Microsoft complaints? My Old Windows Licenses aren't doing me any good....
. And of course fix those neutral ratings against Microsoft's e-bay account

I Almost accepted a job with paypal last weel - Nice people, nice offices, lousy commute, but I really declined because it would have made me a small part of an already large venture, now that this is through I'd be an even smaller part of this grey commerce beast. (It was one of 4 offers)

PayPal rules - hope it doesn't change

[MarkWatson]

I know that some people have reasonable complaints against PayPal, but for me, their service rocks.

It took only a few minutes to sign up and add their canned HTML forms to my web site.

I write free web books, and I use PayPal to accept donations and it is also useful for accepting payment for consulting services and the few commercial products that I sell.

I did a fair amount of research re: getting a merchant account, etc., but I think that PayPal works out a little cheaper for me; it is also zero hassle.

One possible thing to worry about: they do have the right to freeze your bank account if a customer ever wants a refund and you don't have funds to cover the refund in your PayPal account. I have never been asked for a refund (after many, many transactions) but for safety I always just leave some money in my PayPal account - the interest that I loose in a year doing this is negligible compared to the costs of a merchant account, etc.

-Mark

Re:PayPal rules - hope it doesn't change

[squiggleslash]

I've had problems with PayPal where their "fraud" detection systems effectively made every transaction a potential nightmare. When I tried to talk to them about it, they sent me a canned response which answered a question I hadn't asked. When I replied, they sent the same canned response tacked, in classic MS email style, onto the front of the email chain. When I replied and asked them what was up, I received the same canned response. ad-nauseum. When I threatened to close the account, I received a canned "Please don't" response, which again failed to deal with any of the issues I raised.

I'm hoping that eBay taking over will deal with the problems I had. A minor issue - to do with delivery addresses and incorrect instructions on outgoing emails - made every PayPal transaction a gamble which would typically take a week to sort out if I "lost". I pretty much gave up on eBay for the most part thanks to that bunch of clowns, except for the occasional transaction I could do with Billpoint.

eBay needs to address PayPal's deficiencies. Billpoint was quicker, easier, and less moronic, when it came to auction transactions, and I hope desperately that Billpoint's advantages will migrate over to PayPal, not that PayPal's psychotic paranoid tendancies and cretinous customer "service" will become the only choice.