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PayPal Acquires card.io
- Matt_Mickiewicz 14y agoSmart move... now they just need to buy up SQUARE and iZETTLE. Anybody know the price paid?
- ChuckMcM 14y agoI would be more hopeful that they would buy up zendesk or some sort of actually useful support competency. I really think the amazingly poor phone support on things when they go squishy from Paypal is holding it back big time.
- dangrossman 14y agoAll my experiences with PayPal's phone support have been fantastic, from handling ridiculous disputes from crazy customers, to getting information about services, to updating tax info for the 1099-K stuff. Given we only see maybe a dozen major 'PayPal fail' stories a year with 200+ million accounts, their record seems pretty good. Even the famous PayPalSucks forum attracts a handful of threads a month. IOW, I think they're better than most people give them credit for, and above average among all the big corps whose support I've had to use.
- ttran4 14y ago200+ million accounts but over 99 percent of them are "limited"
- michaelpinto 14y ago...try and delete and Paypal account, it's hell.
- Karunamon 14y ago>All my experiences with PayPal's phone support have been fantastic Give me the elite support phone number you've been using. Every time I've called, I get: * Someone who speaks broken english * Who can't actually do anything with any of my problems * And can 9 times out of 10 not pull up my account. Their backend is apparently made out of spit and duct tape. Seriously. I got a Paypal nastygram saying my account was going to be limited (despite not having any activity for OVER A YEAR), which was then mysteriously lifted 6 months later, again for no real reason, and CS was utterly useless in explaining WTF. <mode="rant" intensity="120%"> Fuck these opaque, non-overrideable "risk algorithms". The least you bastards could do is explain to me why you limited my account. And don't tell me I'm a 'risk' either, assholes. I've had an account with you in good standing for over 10 years, stop treating me like i'm some random you've never dealt with, put your fingers on the keyboard, and remove these idiotic limits. Pricks. </mode>
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- dsl 14y ago> Give me the elite support phone number you've been using. 888-221-1161. Spend over $5k/yr and you get premium phone support via PayPal Advantage.
- viraptor 14y ago> Someone who speaks broken english Never understood this complaint. I think you meant the second point rather than the first one really - you get the wrong broken-English speaking people. For some time I was the person who could actually do something about problems, but the support team was staffed by 100% British people. And believe me, my spoken English was very broken.
- Karunamon 14y ago> Never understood this complaint. Because when you have an issue, moreso an urgent one, the last thing you want to be doing is repeating yourself and asking the other guy to repeat themselves many times. Misunderstandings at that level could at the very least lose you access to your account. There's a reason I've taken to using TTY service to deal with companies where ever possible, it completely eliminates that ambiguity.
- Karunamon 14y ago>Smart move... now they just need to buy up SQUARE No, no no no no, no, HELL no. Square is one of Paypal's only real competitors. And a real competitor is what Paypal needs to fix their horrid UI and customer service.
- aMtnViewer 14y agoexactly why square won't sell out to paypal
- callmeed 14y agoPersonally, I'd rather Square and Stripe got married.
- dzohrob 14y agocongrats to Mike and the card.io team!
- mmettler 14y agoThanks Dave!
- kategleason 14y agoawesome!
- sandfox 14y agoAnyone else read the 2nd to last paragraph and giggle a bit: >to get the opportunity to work on projects that will accelerate innovation at a scale that’s just not possible at a startup. Since when have PayPal done anything innovative in the last few years. (I am genuinely interested in answers to this)
- maratd 14y agoThey haven't done anything innovative since they were acquired by eBay. Well, unless you consider freezing accounts and confiscating funds an innovative activity.
- dangrossman 14y agoSince being acquired by eBay they: * Lowered transaction fees for volume merchants from 2.2% to 1.9% * Partnered with many of the largest payment gateways to add PayPal to their services * Introduced PayPal mobile and NFC phone-to-phone payments * Introduced micropayments * Introduced two-factor authentication * Got their European Union banking license and expanded to 100+ countries * Began offering PayPal Buyer Credit (transactional lines of credit) * Moved into retail stores, accepting PayPal at credit card terminals in-store * Began offering a mobile card reader to accept payments into a PayPal account * Introduced student accounts with parental controls * Opened their API for development of peer-to-peer payment services * Introduced virtual, one-time-use credit card numbers * Began offering merchant gift certificates * Introduced a "storefront widget" that could be embedded in websites * Began offering SMS-based authentication * Began offering a virtual terminal for manually keying in offline/phone orders * Introduced PayPal Pro and the ability to store payment authorizations you can charge against in the future (i.e. a payment vault with permission controlled by the customer).
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- rationalbeats 14y agoAll those things are great, but I stopped using them when I realized they can freeze my money, or remove money from a linked checking account for whatever reason they decide and I have almost no recourse except to hire a very expensive lawyer or hope I can start a viral campaign about my money being stolen by Pay Pal. And since they are not a "bank" they are not regulated by the same laws as other banks, and credit cards. Bottom line, they lost my trust, and nothing that you have listed regains that trust for me.
- BallinBige 14y agoIt's funny PandoDaily was just talking about the demise of PayPal too. http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/14/exactly-how-screwed-is-paypal-hint-very/ http://pandodaily.com/2012/07/14/exactly-how-screwed-is-payp... PayPal's payment volume grew 24% y/o/y to $34 billion' as well.. http://seekingalpha.com/article/513741-ebay-poised-for-paypal-growth http://seekingalpha.com/article/513741-ebay-poised-for-paypa.... I hate to admit it, but PayPal is not going anywhere
- kuida0r3 14y agoIs there a lower resistance alternative for a general consumer transferring money to a friend over the web/mobile phone? I default to using PayPal since the chances of my friend having a Paypal account is higher than the newer services.
- Sidnicious 14y agoVenmo (agreed, it's a newer service and not everyone has an account yet, but it's the easiest/lowest friction one I've seen.)
- BallinBige 14y agosending money P2P with the paypal app is fairly friction-less. Either way - this is great news for an industry (Fin-Tech) that needs more alternatives and more transparency
- eridius 14y agoI've been experimenting with Dwolla lately. They charge $0.25 per transaction over $10 (and nothing for under $10). The downside is they skip credit cards and go straight for your bank account so you a) need to hook up your bank account to them (which I did for PayPal anyway), and b) unless you have money hanging out in your Dwolla account, paying someone takes 3 days for the bank transfer to clear (which, again, is going to happen with PayPal anyway if you use a bank and don't run a balance, like me). My only real problem with Dwolla is their iOS app sucks, and their website isn't a whole lot better. But I've had no problems with their actual service, although I've only transferred a few hundred dollars so far.
- zacharyvoase 14y agocard.io is pretty cool—I wasn't aware of it until now. I’m just shocked at how poor the security of the entire consumer finance system is, if you can accept payment just by taking a photo of someone’s card. I wouldn’t be surprised if professional credit card fraudsters had implemented this technology years ago (except with covert cameras). A sincere question: what would stop you from photocopying someone’s card and using it to buy goods with this system? At least with Square you need a magnetic barcode, which might act as a very mild deterrent. EDIT: FYI, I live in Europe, where we’ve had Chip & PIN-verified PoS transactions for a while now. Still not the best security, but at least it’s no longer trivial.
- MetallicCloud 14y agoAt least in Australia, all you need to make a purchase with a credit card is the numbers and dates on the front, and the 3 digit security code on the back. Having a program extract these values automatically wouldn't make this any less secure.
- saurik 14y agoAFAIK, cards processed with card.io are processed as if they were "card not present" transactions, which have a different risk profile (and thereby different fee structure) than "card present" transactions (that requires some information that is on the magnetic strip that you can't just read off the card itself).
- rogerjin 14y agoThe actual scan technology is very specific and hard if not impossible (with current tech) to implement on things like a photocopied card. A real card needs to be used.
- mfkp 14y agoCard.io essentially just types in the information on the front of the card for you (card number, cardholder name, expiration date). For most applications, you probably still need to type in the billing zip code and CVV (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_security_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Card_security_code) found on the back of the card.
- fcoury 14y agoYou can judge the complexity of a company when its blog domain is theCOMPANYblog.com instead of blog.company.com...
- statictype 14y agoa) You seem to use the word 'complexity' like it's a good thing. Maybe you meant 'sophistication'? b) That sounds like a poor metric for sophistication. I remember someone mentioning (maybe patio11) that company.com/blog was better from a SEO perspective than a separate subdomain. Maybe they're showing more sophistication than you think?
- TomGullen 14y agoblog.company.com is a pretty big mistake from an SEO perspective
- drtonyratliff 14y agoPayPal needs to buy up the rest.