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PayPal Accuses Google of Poaching Mobile Payment Trade Secrets, Personnel
jhernik writes with a selection from eWeek Europe's short story on a snag facing Google's new mobile payment system: "PayPal, eBay's payment service, has sued Google over its new Google Wallet service, accusing the search engine of poaching trade secrets for use in its mobile payment service. The suit, filed in Santa Clara County Superior Court just hours after Google unveiled its Wallet payments sheme, alleges that two key executives who created the near-field communication (NFC) service used company secrets about mobile payments to fashion its own service."
Checks are far, far too costly.
There's nothing stopping someone from sending you a bad check. What happens if you cash it? Your bank charges you a bounced-check fee, not them, YOU. (And yes, their bank changes them a fee too.)
Why do you think just about every retail place has stopped accepting checks now? They're inherently a bad system, and the cost of dealing with a bad check is too high.
When you're selling old shit on Ebay or Craigslist or whatever, a $30 bad-check charge will eat up your profits for several items, not just that one. It just isn't worth it.
On top of that, it's too slow. It takes several days for stuff to arrive in the mail, but you also don't know how prompt the buyer is in paying for his shit; some of them sit on it for days before paying. Then you have to wait 10 days for the check to clear before you can send their stuff. Meanwhile, they're bitching because it's taking 3 weeks for them to get their item. And what if something goes wrong? What if the buyer didn't pay at all? This is very, very common on Ebay for some reason: I'd guess that fully 5% of buyers never pay for their items. This number isn't pulled out of my ass, it's what happened to me when I sold all my old Transformers on Ebay a few months ago. With Paypal-only payments, you file an unpaid item dispute, and if payment doesn't show up on Paypal in 1 day, then you re-list and void the old transaction. With checks and the USPS, you have to wait a week or two.
Sending a check would be fine if the vast majority (like 99.99%) of buyers were honest, but they're not.