7 ms·

Innovation Nation: WePay is the anti-PayPal

88 points by pg 16y ago

wccrawford 16y ago
This is not an 'anti-PayPal' in any way, shape or form. They offer a service that PayPal doesn't yet. It is not opposed to PayPal and it doesn't replace PayPal's services at all.
- joeuser12 16y ago
  PayPal has a group payment product - https://www.paypal-collect-money.com/?adtrack=2 https://www.paypal-collect-money.com/?adtrack=2 If that is not the same in any way, shape or form, then you have a really odd view of the world.
- noodle 16y ago
  i think they said "the anti-" and meant "complementary to"
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- pg 16y ago
  Presumably the author means anti- in the sense it's used in anti-matter, not the sense it's used in anti-globalization.
  - triii 16y ago
    When WePay & PayPal touch they'll annihilate eachother with a huge burst of energy? :) Too bad headlines need to be clickable rather than accurate.
    - danishkhan 16y ago
      The anti in anti-matter = of the same kind but situated opposite whereas anti-globalization = being against.
    - pg 16y ago
      Obviously I mean in the sense of a complement. And it is an accurate use of the word in that sense. WePay is the other half of online payments: PayPal is for businesses, and WePay is for people who need to collect money but aren't businesses.
- billclerico 16y ago
  i agree to some extent. our service is not directly competitive with paypal's core business. however - we consider ourselves very anti-paypal when it comes to our culture and the way we treat & market to customers
clistctrl 16y ago
The CEO was a speaker at this years startup bootcamp, it was an interesting talk. http://blog.wepay.com/2010/10/wepay-ceo-bill-clerico-at-startup-bootcamp/ http://blog.wepay.com/2010/10/wepay-ceo-bill-clerico-at-star...
- bmac 16y ago
  I second watching the WePay talk. One of the best pieces of advice I heard at Startup bootcamp came from Bill Clerico (WePay CEO) when he described building software as a community process. It seemed like an elegant way to say users are what really matter and it applies equally well to commercial, open source and personal projects.
jfager 16y ago
I have long wondered why Facebook doesn't do this. Group birthday gifts, wedding registries, basically any social scenario where money needs to change hands, it seems like FB would be so well positioned to take an honest buck from.
- iamdave 16y ago
  No. Do you know why? Facebook acts as if it were completely incapable of knowing when far is too far. Whenever something new rolls out, it always comes off like outsourced peer-pressure. 'HEY LOOK AT WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING BUT YOU!!' No thank you, sir.
  - jfager 16y ago
    The question of whether FB as it exists now would abuse such a system (yes, of course they would, they're awful) is separate from the question of whether or not said system would make business sense for a gigantic social network. If FB were the kind of company that could figure out how to make money without ads or taxing 3rd party devs, maybe they'd also be the kind of company that would treat its users as customers rather than products. Hypotheticals all around.
    - iamdave 16y ago
      You've actually got an excellent point to this.
taelor_rb 16y ago
Question: So my adult (beer league) hockey team is trying to start a slush fund so that we can pay for things like new jerseys, water bottles, shared resources type stuff. We are looking at trying to get a group account for this, and WePay looks like its exactly what we need. But the accounts we talk to say that we would have to pay taxes on this account, if its in a bank account. Would WePay be a way to get around paying these taxes? Does anyone else have any insight to how we could set this up? Is this question way to off topic for Hacker News?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
pinksoda 16y ago
I really hope WePay destroys PayPal. They have screwed myself and my friends too many times. The homepage layout is all wrong though. Poor element placement, messy typography, and the color scheme is off. It looks amateur and unpolished. All those SEO'd subpages are worthless if they don't convert. Also: - Upgrade to Nginx 0.7.67, there was a lot of bug fixes in 0.7.65 and 0.7.66. - Limit the number of login attempts to prevent brute forcing. - Don't show "That email address was not found" when someone tries to recover a password. You are giving out too much info, which can be used maliciously. - Block scraper/vuln scanner/curl scripts by user-agent to keep away the script kiddies and botnets. - Don't host your Javascript on Google. This gives hackers another possible point of entry. It's probably safe, but you're better off limiting points of entry. - Use mod_rewrite as an additional layer of security. You'll need to slightly modify it to make it work with Nginx. - Remove "access info anytime" and "post to my wall anytime" when signing up with Facebook. - Limit SSH access by IP address. Feel free to contact me if you need help.
- seiji 16y ago
  Wow, "ssh wepay.com" works. Turn that off. Once again, "cloud" doesn't mean "lol, we don't need to know about servers!"
  - modoc 16y ago
    That's totally nutty. Not sure how they passed a PCI audit like that. In fact, I don't see that they are PCI certified on their site?
  - ez77 16y ago
    I must admit I didn't know the big domains disabled ssh. Naive/beginner's question: how do programmers work remotely at these companies (if it's allowed at all)? Do they ssh into other (safe) servers, from which a safe transfer is eventually made into the production servers?
    - whakojacko 16y ago
      You could set it up by allowing sshing to a server on a subdomain something like ssh.xyz.com or vpn.xyz.com and from there can ssh to production servers, which are set up to only allow ssh internally.
dbul 16y ago
Someone I know recently told me about her nightmare when she was collecting money for a class reunion via PayPal last month: she had to register as a non-profit, and PayPal wanted her water bill to prove that they were indeed a non-profit despite being recognized by the government as one. So much hassle; I wish I had known she was going to do that so I could have told her about WePay, especially with this kind of customer service: A call to WePay's customer service department quickly sorted out the problem. Plus, the company gave him $20 for the inconvenience.
jscore 16y ago
Homepage is too busy. Simplify it a bit.
jscore 16y ago
Sounds like a play from the book REWORK: Mobilize against an enemy (or something like that). It's just words; WePay is not another competing product, it's basically a bunch of features that PayPal can implement and with >80M accounts, they can easily kill it. Say what you want about PayPal, but each one of you should read PayPal Wars to learn the inside story of how PayPal worked and competed. They basically pioneered the person-to-person payment service and faced a myriad of issues before eventually selling to eBay.

88 points by pg 16y ago

This is not an 'anti-PayPal' in any way, shape or form. They offer a service that PayPal doesn't yet. It is not opposed to PayPal and it doesn't replace PayPal's services at all.

joeuser12 16y ago
PayPal has a group payment product - https://www.paypal-collect-money.com/?adtrack=2 https://www.paypal-collect-money.com/?adtrack=2 If that is not the same in any way, shape or form, then you have a really odd view of the world.
noodle 16y ago
i think they said "the anti-" and meant "complementary to"
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
pg 16y ago
Presumably the author means anti- in the sense it's used in anti-matter, not the sense it's used in anti-globalization.
- triii 16y ago
  When WePay & PayPal touch they'll annihilate eachother with a huge burst of energy? :) Too bad headlines need to be clickable rather than accurate.
  - danishkhan 16y ago
    The anti in anti-matter = of the same kind but situated opposite whereas anti-globalization = being against.
  - pg 16y ago
    Obviously I mean in the sense of a complement. And it is an accurate use of the word in that sense. WePay is the other half of online payments: PayPal is for businesses, and WePay is for people who need to collect money but aren't businesses.
billclerico 16y ago
i agree to some extent. our service is not directly competitive with paypal's core business. however - we consider ourselves very anti-paypal when it comes to our culture and the way we treat & market to customers

clistctrl 16y ago

The CEO was a speaker at this years startup bootcamp, it was an interesting talk. http://blog.wepay.com/2010/10/wepay-ceo-bill-clerico-at-startup-bootcamp/ http://blog.wepay.com/2010/10/wepay-ceo-bill-clerico-at-star...

bmac 16y ago
I second watching the WePay talk. One of the best pieces of advice I heard at Startup bootcamp came from Bill Clerico (WePay CEO) when he described building software as a community process. It seemed like an elegant way to say users are what really matter and it applies equally well to commercial, open source and personal projects.

jfager 16y ago

I have long wondered why Facebook doesn't do this. Group birthday gifts, wedding registries, basically any social scenario where money needs to change hands, it seems like FB would be so well positioned to take an honest buck from.

iamdave 16y ago
No. Do you know why? Facebook acts as if it were completely incapable of knowing when far is too far. Whenever something new rolls out, it always comes off like outsourced peer-pressure. 'HEY LOOK AT WHAT EVERYONE ELSE IS DOING BUT YOU!!' No thank you, sir.
- jfager 16y ago
  The question of whether FB as it exists now would abuse such a system (yes, of course they would, they're awful) is separate from the question of whether or not said system would make business sense for a gigantic social network. If FB were the kind of company that could figure out how to make money without ads or taxing 3rd party devs, maybe they'd also be the kind of company that would treat its users as customers rather than products. Hypotheticals all around.
  - iamdave 16y ago
    You've actually got an excellent point to this.

taelor_rb 16y ago

Question: So my adult (beer league) hockey team is trying to start a slush fund so that we can pay for things like new jerseys, water bottles, shared resources type stuff. We are looking at trying to get a group account for this, and WePay looks like its exactly what we need. But the accounts we talk to say that we would have to pay taxes on this account, if its in a bank account. Would WePay be a way to get around paying these taxes? Does anyone else have any insight to how we could set this up? Is this question way to off topic for Hacker News?

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

pinksoda 16y ago

I really hope WePay destroys PayPal. They have screwed myself and my friends too many times. The homepage layout is all wrong though. Poor element placement, messy typography, and the color scheme is off. It looks amateur and unpolished. All those SEO'd subpages are worthless if they don't convert. Also: - Upgrade to Nginx 0.7.67, there was a lot of bug fixes in 0.7.65 and 0.7.66. - Limit the number of login attempts to prevent brute forcing. - Don't show "That email address was not found" when someone tries to recover a password. You are giving out too much info, which can be used maliciously. - Block scraper/vuln scanner/curl scripts by user-agent to keep away the script kiddies and botnets. - Don't host your Javascript on Google. This gives hackers another possible point of entry. It's probably safe, but you're better off limiting points of entry. - Use mod_rewrite as an additional layer of security. You'll need to slightly modify it to make it work with Nginx. - Remove "access info anytime" and "post to my wall anytime" when signing up with Facebook. - Limit SSH access by IP address. Feel free to contact me if you need help.

seiji 16y ago
Wow, "ssh wepay.com" works. Turn that off. Once again, "cloud" doesn't mean "lol, we don't need to know about servers!"
- modoc 16y ago
  That's totally nutty. Not sure how they passed a PCI audit like that. In fact, I don't see that they are PCI certified on their site?
- ez77 16y ago
  I must admit I didn't know the big domains disabled ssh. Naive/beginner's question: how do programmers work remotely at these companies (if it's allowed at all)? Do they ssh into other (safe) servers, from which a safe transfer is eventually made into the production servers?
  - whakojacko 16y ago
    You could set it up by allowing sshing to a server on a subdomain something like ssh.xyz.com or vpn.xyz.com and from there can ssh to production servers, which are set up to only allow ssh internally.

dbul 16y ago

Someone I know recently told me about her nightmare when she was collecting money for a class reunion via PayPal last month: she had to register as a non-profit, and PayPal wanted her water bill to prove that they were indeed a non-profit despite being recognized by the government as one. So much hassle; I wish I had known she was going to do that so I could have told her about WePay, especially with this kind of customer service: A call to WePay's customer service department quickly sorted out the problem. Plus, the company gave him $20 for the inconvenience.

jscore 16y ago

Homepage is too busy. Simplify it a bit.

jscore 16y ago

Sounds like a play from the book REWORK: Mobilize against an enemy (or something like that). It's just words; WePay is not another competing product, it's basically a bunch of features that PayPal can implement and with >80M accounts, they can easily kill it. Say what you want about PayPal, but each one of you should read PayPal Wars to learn the inside story of how PayPal worked and competed. They basically pioneered the person-to-person payment service and faced a myriad of issues before eventually selling to eBay.