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Yahoo Shuts Down Their PayPal Competitor
LostCluster writes "MSNBC and ZDnet are both reporting that Yahoo and HSBC have announced a shutdown plan for their PayDirect service which was their rival to PayPal. Since CitiBank abandoned their c2it service last year, PayPal now seems to be a monopoly by default." There are other players in this field, though, like bidpay and worldpay.
If a company won't take my credit card, I don't purchase their merchandise, period.
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
I still can't believe how clumsy the eBay to Paypal interface is a year after the merger. Can't they make it seemless so that my customers don't have to sign in twice to make a payment?? They certainly have made enough in fees to improve the system.
This is just more hyperbolic editorial blather on the part of timothy. If you can name a couple of significant competitors off of the top of your head, then it's not a monopoly. It would be a monopoly if it were impossible to use anything but PayPal, but it's not. We all have a choice. If we hate PayPal that much maybe we should launch a boycott of them and all tangentially related companies. Then we can use the superior alternatives instead of letting PP become the next Microsoft.
He corrected the submitter by naming several competitors. He could've gone further by removing the submitter's comment entirely, though.
no, you don't need a MONOPOLY.
what you need is co-operation between the competing services.
around here we dont' have a monopoly in banking services.. but transferring money between banks is _easy_ because they co-operate.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I hope somebody will step up and prove me wrong, but after some extensive searching, I can't come up with any better alternatives than PayPal. For simply and cheaply accepting credit card payments.
Killer features: no sign up cost, no monthly (yearly, whatever) fee, low transaction costs, works around the world, accepts all major credit cards, as well as other payment methods.
Only two disadvantages I can identify: buyers need to create an account (unless paying to an US business), and PayPal's...reputation.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
So often when an idea comes around, one player emerges as disproportionately successful, and in that early charge it's very difficult to achieve competitive diversity.
That sounds similar to the way in which Netscape Navigator was the clear leader in the web browser market until a less expensive alternative was developed.
[rant]They're owned by eBay, so when you sell something, and get via Paypal, eBay is now double dipping.
They get money for the listing, AND money from your money.
If they were a nice company like Google, one or the other would be free if you used both eBay and Paypal on a given sale, but like most greedy coroporations they don't care about making their customers happy, they care about making the maximum amount of money from their customers. [/rant]
Question everything
why can't a public forum also do so without getting flamed for violating free speech? It seems like their is not much reward in allowing that and other words to be spoken or typed.
;)
What do you mean reward? That's _exactly_ the line between freedom and censorship - you don't like the word, fine. But please don't try to tell me what words I should and should not use.
The dynamics of yelling FIRE in a theater are similar to saying the F word in front of children
No they ain't!. The former might result in a panic and thus people actually being hurt. Who you say fuck in front of is a manner of your personal fucking taste.
I guess darwin will take care of it in time anyway.
If only evolution always followed what I think is right...
It's has been and will continue to be my position that people sufficiently illiterate to confuse the words niggardly or reneged with a racial slur are the ones who need to be removed. Changing the language to avoid offending the ignorant is NOT a good thing.
European banks generally offer these transactions at negligible cost to the customer. Very often these account to account transfers are actually included in a flat account management price, so they're virtually free. The ECBS (European Committee for Banking Standards) has defined the IBAN (International Banking Account Number) standard which has greatly simplified international transactions, to the point that account to account transfers within the EU are now free if you use IBAN instead of the older national account numbers. As long as you're only doing business within the EU, you don't really need PayPal or similar banking surrogates. The real boon of PayPal is that it opens the gate to transactions with partners outside the EU. Making or receiving small payments over the pond used to be prohibitively expensive and time consuming.
This is one of those words that we could easily remove from the lexicon if we could get over the absolutist position that ALL free speech is a good thing
Or better yet, we could all learn the proper definitions of the words.
Oh wait, that assumes the liability of effort onto the part of the ignorant. You're right, let's outlaw uncommon words that sound vaguely similar to common offensive words. I hearby renege all uncommon words and niggardly parse to you all a cleansed vocabulary.
Oops!
I watched a special on money.. Most people that the guy went to thought it was real money, even though it was just liberty money..
I was interested in this 'money'. So I went to there site. Learned a little about.. Everything that I was learning about it just seemed so Anti-Government. Such as You don't have a to pay taxes.. Know what taxes keep this country going.. If you arn't going to pay taxes (honestly) Then get out. I don't want to pick up your burden because you found a "legal out" while legal isn't ethical.
Another thing I found was that it is a backed currency, Joy so I can trade in my liberty notes for silver.. Tell me how is that going to help me if I need food. As for the dollar being fiat so what so is silver. Silver has no value unless it can be used for something usefull. When you get down to it no many is really value backed unless it is accepted.. So if everyone needs food but all they have is silver.. Silver is useless.. ( Unless it's being used as a conductive)
I will not accept liberty money.. And again I hate how they try to pass it off as "regular money"
When it works, it works great.
Its how they handle problems that is the problem.
Here in australia, I can log into my online banking and transfer money directly to any australian bank account with any other bank.
If banks worldwide got together and made that possible for the entire world (just think of all the Bank Fees they would be able to charge for the privilage) it would put an end to crap like Paycrud.
Oh ye of little faith and lotsa blindness :-)
a nd sign up for an account :-)
The reason many e-gold-accepting sites look pretty poor is because they are almost always owner-designer-operator jobs of someone doing it all himself. You are comparing a garage sale with a frigging strip mall and then wonder why there is no cafeteria in the garage.
I haven't come accross any pedophilia or similar pervert sites accepting e-gold in quite a while. There were a few early in the year but the more respectable 'exchangers' and their association made it difficult for them to get their ill-gotten gains out of the system.
There is an entire casino site, built specifically for e-gold and other online currency users, which doing rather well for itself. Of course, they are actually pros and not one of the cut and paste carder jobs the web is rampant with.
Lastly, there are 1.5 million e-gold accounts, about half of which are funded, which isn't huge, but sizeable.
Credit cards are pro consumer, charge backs are easy for buyers, fraud is rampant.
e-gold is pro-merchants, charge backs are impossible, fraud is reasonably moderate, and e-gold does react to complaints by suspending accounts, but you need a court order to get more details.
PayPal is pro PayPal. The charge back from both ends, play buyers against sellers and keep the loot from both sides. At least that is what used to happen quite frequently.
Imagine you sell some kit for a grand and six months later PayPal grabs a grand from your bank account and tells you the charge was reversed, because the buyer was a crook. Imagine then you personally know the buyer and know he's not a crook. Worse, imagine the buyer calls you and tells you that P(r)ayPal took the money off his account and off the account of someone who had bought something from him earlier, as well.
That used to be PayPal. I'm not sure if they still are, but it did happen to us, so I believe every single word at www.paypal-warning.com
Now go to
http://www.e-gold.com/e-gold.asp?cid=310408
I love e-gold. It's not a haven for criminals, but rather for people who love gold, along with some others like GoldMoney.com, e-bullion.com, pecunix.com and 1mdc.com.
PayPal is funded with credit cards and has the risk of credit cards. e-gold carries very little risk for the merchant. It's a 'harder' currency. One might use PayPal to buy consumer merchandise, but one could use e-gold to buy a house, a car, or a gyrocopter. You could never do that with PayPal.
SnowDog