4 ms·

Really? Are you saying PayPal is not profitable and the lack of profitability is due to the costs of phone support for noobs forgetting their password? Don't

Really? Are you saying PayPal is not profitable and the lack of profitability is due to the costs of phone support for noobs forgetting their password? Don't throw ARPUs at me. Either they are profitable or they are not. I can certainly understand the argument that users of other sign-on systems "may" remember their passwords better than PayPal, but what evidence do you have of this? What extra margin of increased password remembrance makes for a more profitable model?

davemc500hats 17y ago
no that's not what i'm saying. PayPal explicitly chose to not answer telephone support in order to keep costs down for low-value avg users (which is most non-merchants / non-eBay fanatics). it was deemed to be "cheaper" to just not deal with a minority % of password recovery cases (that might also occasionally be fraud) than to provide high-cost customer support for low-value average users. think about it: if you can cut a minority % of your customer base that causes a large % of the cost (or simply just more than they are worth) then you can make more money. this wasn't such a big mistake in itself, except that PayPal probably didn't consider the network effect of negative brand damage due to not providing very good customer service for such a large # -- though still minority -- of users. i'm saying this: 1) telephone support is expensive, and doesn't offset low-value ARPU 2)