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EBay Acquiring VeriSign Processing for $370 Million

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the spending-money-to-justify-spending-more dept.

Forum124 was one of the first in a wave of readers to tell us that eBay is acquiring VeriSign's payment processing business for US$370 million. VeriSign will be merged with PayPal and is estimated to generate a 20 percent operating margin which eBay hopes to help offset the recently reported high purchase price of Skype.

2 of 123 comments (clear)

  1. Boost to Paypal? by onion2k · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Legg Mason analyst Scott Devitt said the deal promises to give PayPal a leg-up in becoming the accepted payment mechanism system on VeriSign's 100,000 or so small business sites.

    My experience tells me otherwise. I've been developing small business ecommerce sites for the past 10 years, and on every single development I've been part of we've tried to avoid Paypal integration simply because it puts users off. As I'm based in the UK I've had very little experience of Verisign's payment gateway, but if users have a worse perception of it than they do of Paypal's then I'd be really suprised.

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    http://twitter.com/onion2k
  2. Verisign is teh suck by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If someone is already habitually doing business with VeriSign, they're accustom to abysmal service, so I doubt this merger will force them to abandon ship.

    In my professional geek career, I have yet to met a business that could top VeriSign's ability to cause grief, stress, development delays, and outrageous legal fees.

    VeriSign is responsible for the collapse of the last company I worked for. We spent 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars designing and developing a retail solution based around a particular domain name. Unfortunately, the CEO fell victim of identity theft before we launched and some a-hole was able to acquire our domain names though ****ing VeriSign.

    You'd think we'd be able to get them back easily. We had receipts and we didn't authorize the transfer. But, nooo. They wouldn't cooperate with our lawyers or the California Computer Crimes Task Force. It was SUCH a pain.

    And I know I'm not alone on this one. VeriSign is the biggest POS.
    I have several, less destructive, examples of being screwed by that company. But I'll spare you for now.

    Hopefully, Ebay will make VeriSign slightly less crappy.

    --
    "Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"