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PayPal Debuts a Credit Card That Offers 2% Cash Back (bloomberg.com)
PayPal is turning to its old nemesis, plastic, to help it expand beyond the digital realm. From a report: The online payments venture is introducing a credit card that offers customers 2 percent cash back on purchases -- one of the industry's highest rebate rates -- with no annual fee. The rewards will appear in users' online wallets and can be spent immediately on additional PayPal purchases or transferred to a bank. The move is part of Chief Executive Officer Dan Schulman's effort to transform PayPal from a payments button on websites into a versatile financial tool for everyday use, even in brick-and-mortar stores. He's forged 24 deals over the past 18 months with technology and financial companies including Apple, Visa and JPMorgan Chase, looking to make PayPal ubiquitous in the lives of its 210 million customers. The company already tested the card with some of them.
With they way they unnecessarily seize the monetary assets of 100s of thousands of their customers, you're going to need the 2% cash back in order to justify your relationship with them.
Let's make like a bird... and get the flock outta here.
PayPal issues credit cards, pays interest on balance... but still isn't (regulated as) a bank (in North America.)
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Do they still randomly confiscate contents of your accounts? I guess since this is a credit card product, now they will also have an ability to max the credit card for you.
Too bad this news is US only. I have a Canadian PayPal account and the page to sign up is not accessible.
Now in addition to needing to reset my PayPal passwords at paypalscam.serv3486.co, I've got emails that tell me to log into paypal.scamhaus.ru so my credit card won't stop working. What's next, PayPal mortgages so I can have my down payment routed to ppmortgageredirectmoneyscam.biz?
Because I cancelled my account when I became aware of their unethical practices. I don't give businesses second chances. No one else should, either.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
In other news, my credit union offered an "eclipse astounding" debt consolidation loan at 8% APR. The 2% back credit card that I have is 24% APR. If I pay the same monthly amount that I paid on the credit card for the debt consolidation loan, I'll be out of debt in three years. Seems like a no brainer.
Been doing that for nearly 20 years with my Paypal debit card. Has the advantage that it sends me email every time it gets used too.
If you use a 2% card in the long haul, that's likely going to pay for an entire year of your life, just by selecting said form of payment.
Yes, you can argue about how it gets passed on the stores and thus the consumers till you're blue in the face, but none of the places I shop at offer cash discounts, even though they're allowed to, so it's strictly a disadvantage to not do this.
Thing is, I'm really unsure about this offering. If it excludes paypal purchases from the 2% back, then it'd seem to make little sense, since you can otherwise just use an existing 2% back card with paypal.
I would not trust PayPal for anything important. I have an account with them, but it was only to pay for one thing online, that only accepted paypal. once they started accepting real CC's, I switched to using that. I have not logged into my PP account for years.
Someday, one of these tech companies will get smart and offer 7-10% interest on a card for those who are good risk.
And when a good tech company does it, they will make millions off it.
BUT, paypay is doing the SAME BS as other companies. High interest on all with some treats for the idiots.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Are you sure this was posted correctly? Really looks like an ad.
CitiBank has one of these as well. You get 1% at the time of purchase and 1% when you pay down your balance:
https://www.citi.com/credit-cards/credit-card-details/citi.action?ID=citi-double-cash-credit-card
Those of us that have first hand experience with PayPal's bullshit practices don't need to " get a grip ", we KNOW what PayPal does.
Which is why we refuse to use it.
One day you'll wake up to an email claiming your accounts have been frozen for ' security reasons ' and you'll begin the game of how to regain access to them.
Assuming you can. I gave up after two years and just wrote the account off as a loss.
Absolutely will not give them another dime by any means.
Utilize their unregulated services at your own peril, but never claim you weren't warned.
I've had a 2% cash back, zero fee credit card from CapitalOne for about 4 years now.
Bigger players can't do this.
Large merchants pay under 2% plus a couple of cents per transaction. Much of that goes to the merchant's bank / underwriter / payment processor, not the card issuer. The issuer makes their money on interest and annual fees.
PayPal can do this because they deposit 2% into a PayPal account and gouge 3% from the PayPal merchant when you use it.
For normal cards to do this, the card issuing bank would need to get at least 3%, which means the merchant would need to pay 5%, which would end up coming out of the customer's pocket.
So this would be awful if it caught on with other issuers.
With any luck, this will get enough attention to push other cards to 2% on all purchases. Many will do up to 5% on purchases of selected types (typically gas and restaurants), but are 1% in general. Perhaps this will push them to 2%? I sure hope so!
Remember, credit cards used to give you nothing. Then there were air miles cards and Discover offered cash, which eventually led to other cards also giving cash. So despite all of them essentially using the same back end (Visa/MasterCard), there's a lot of competition between card issuers, so I'm optimistic.
This is an ad and it's sad that a mod will have the decency to remove this reply but allow shit like this to make it onto Slashdot.
This socalled cashback is nothing more than a discount on purchases when you buy stuff, and 2% is $2 in every $100 - when has that ever mattered to a real person? And actually, why would anybody use a credit card in an age where debit cards are available - or am I missing something? I have a debit card with my bank account, and I know from experience that it works in shops and cash machines all over Europe, in the US and in China. I would have to pay an annual or monthly fee for having a credit card at all, and in many cases there is a transaction fee as well; none of which I pay for a debit card. Credit cards are simply an expensive way of getting into debt.
Sounds annoying. When my card gets checked for fraud, it's either:
1) 3D verification screen that asks me to enter a code SMSed to me, which doesn't cancel/fail the transaction.
2) If 3D option isn't available, I receive a text message with a code to send back if I am happy to authorize further attempts at transactions with that vendor.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Gouging 3% of 2% means they're still giving you 1.94% cashback, and that's assuming that you don't just transfer the cashback to your main bank account.
Their revenue stream will be the increased use of the Paypal lending itself, so hopefully millions of people will take this card and still not use Paypal and put the corrupt fuckers out of business.
If you have some kind of emotional attachment, perhaps you would.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.