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EBay Acquiring VeriSign Processing for $370 Million
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.
Great, all they need to do now is buy Amazon and they'll own half the internet.
This might be the future of VeriSign:
www.paypalwarning.com (notice that this site hasn't been taken down due to libel)
www.paypalsucks.com (ditto)
Habitual VeriSign customers using VeriSign to collect payments may be wise to abandon ship.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Please wait while we process your credit ca^^439 Ba ding ding ding bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaap bwaaaaaaaaaaaaaap boom bom ding ding ding...
the headline is misleading, very misleading.
which explains why the sum might seem low to some.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The headline is just plain wrong.
EBay is buying one DIVISION of Verisign, not the whole company.
October 10, 2005
Dear Colleagues,
Today, VeriSign took another step forward on our Journey--this time with a respected technology leader and trusted partner, eBay. VeriSign and eBay have formed a strategic alliance that calls for our two companies to collaborate globally on payment services and security initiatives for e-commerce.
This alliance brings together two leaders in online commerce and security to benefit customers and merchants with greater protection, improved technologies, and more streamlined payment processing.
As part of the alliance, PayPal, an eBay company, will acquire our Payment Gateway assets and combine them with their leading merchant services platform. Additionally, we will provide eBay and PayPal with a suite of security services that includes the deployment of the VeriSign Unified Authentication service and up to one million two-factor authentication tokens to be rolled out in 2006. The deployment of VeriSign Unified Authentication will cut across all eBay companies, and we believe it will constitute the largest consumer authentication deployment in history. Please see the fact sheet for details.
Along with our Payment gateway assets, eBay will also be integrating the majority of our Payment Services employees into PayPal, and will be moving them to eBay's San Jose, California campus. I want to thank all of our Payment Services employees for their hard work and incredible results in building this successful business, and for contributing to a strategic alliance that will support the VeriSign mission to enable and protect all forms of digital interactions over the world's voice and data networks.
Sincerely,
Stratton
EBay is acquiring the payment processing unit of VeriSign. The headline on this story (as of this writing) is HORRIBLY misleading.
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.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
eBay and PayPal aren't exactly known for instilling confidence in their customer base. This is a slippery slope for Verisign, who issues SSL certs and must by definition be trustworthy.
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!"
"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."
Let's even skip over the bad perception of PayPal, and trusting my money to someone who's ostensibly not a bank, makes no guarantees, isn't backed by the government, and generally is just some dot-com.
But let's put it like this: if an e-commerce site can't afford to just make a contract with a bank to deal with credit-/debit-cards, why should I feel confident in them. We're not talking some starving web-cartoonist taking micro-payments for a living, we're talking a business and trusting them with, say, a few hundred quid for a new PC or a new 20" TFT monitor. Then I'd expect them to, you know, act like a business and inspire some confidence.
If they can't even afford to get some credit-card processing capability, can they even afford a warehouse, or will I get to wait for a month while they order the stuff directly from the manufacturer? Can they even afford employees, then? (E.g., will I have to wait for a month if it's a one man business and the guy is on vacation?) Will they be around next month, if I need support or to file a RMA?
Plus, I suspect for a lot of people it's also a matter of "usability". Yes, I know it doesn't really fit the real definition of "usability", but please bear with me. It's the same idea: making people jump through extra hoops and go through extra web pages just to buy your product is bad. If someone doesn't have a PayPal account, having to go through all those hoops to register a PayPal account, get confirmed, etc, then finally return to get the product they wanted... some may lose interest and go shop somewhere else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
God could this article be ANY MORE MISLEADING? eBay is buying Verisign Payment Services, which offers software that connects merchant accounts to websites. This represents only 3-4% of Verisign's overall revenues.
Verisign is a MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR COMPANY. What sort of moron would piece together "eBay buys Verisign" from the news reports?! We really need to do something about people doing rapid-fire posts on Slashdot just to see their name / their company's news website in lights. Totally ridiculous.
eBay you say?
I wonder how many bidders there were in the auction...
CLOSING SOON! Payment processing division of an ENORMOUS leading software company.
Current Bid: US $30,000 (Reserve not met)
Buy It Now price: US $370,000,000
Condition: very good condition
Item Location: Mountain View, CA 94043
Ships to: USA only
Shipping costs: ChUS $39.00 - US Postal Service Priority Mail (within United States)
Please check out my other divisions at http://www.verisign.com/verisign-inc/index.html
Ask me about repetitive DNA
EBay doesn't hope that the new purchase will offset the loss from their bad purchase. That wouldn't make sense -- that's done, and it is in the past.
If it is good to by Verisign, they'd buy Verisign, whether or not they bought Skype. Unless buying Skype (and paying too much) was the very thing that allowed them to buy a chunk of Verisign.
The purchase of Skype is what's called a "sunk cost".
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Do analysts ever consider the revenue for the next year when eBay takes over Verisign payments be lower than expected? If I was a merchant, I wouldn't have any ties with Paypal. If I had an account with Verisign, I would be looking for another merchant provider such as Moneris to protect my business.
Paypal doesn't bring any value to those processing credit card payments. I am not saying it because it seems to be the norm these days bashing Paypal, but the fact of the matter is Paypal has conflict of interests everywhere. Merchant providers are supposed to be in favor of the merchant and the bank's credit card business is in the favor of the cardholder. Paypal likes to be bank and provider at the same time.
Lastly, Paypal already offering merchant services. Paypal is simply buying customers to add to their existing clientel. I see a lot of former Verisign merchants leaving.
Not to mention VeriSign owns Jamba!: http://jamba.de/s/dcw/html/about-us_en.html, which produces MAJORLY annoying ringtones and tv commercials to sell them. They try to rip off kids in a way which is actually often illegal (the fine print says you dont actually buy a ringtone, you buy a subscription.. which kids aren't allowed to. etc. that kind of stuff), and annoy the hell out of the rest of us. They operate all over Europe, and according to that link apparently also in North America.
is it just me or is ebay becoming this big black hole and just sucking in everything near it?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.