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Missed a couple big ones from companies they mentioned. Yelp paid professional reviewers to seed cities they wanted to establish themselves in. To my knowledge
by liquidcool 13y ago
Missed a couple big ones from companies they mentioned. Yelp paid professional reviewers to seed cities they wanted to establish themselves in. To my knowledge they were honest reviews, but people were still put off by it.
And the Airbnb spam debacle was left out as well. (http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-dollar-company/ http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...)
For the record, I use both services frequently, but those are notable omissions.
Really curious how much PayPal dumped into buying eBay items. Doesn't seem like something you could do for long, so I imagine it had to be highly targeted.
- noloqy 13y agoIf I were PayPal, I wouldn't primarily be focused on buying items, as it would be very expensive strategy. I'd try sending sellers email first, indicating that you are interested in purchasing their product and asking them if they support PayPal. Having thousands of sellers just visiting your site to see what this "PayPal" is about is a great way of getting your name out there at no cost. Also, if I'm not mistaking, buyers have no right to force sellers to accept a payment method that the seller did not support. Of course you could try to persuade them after you've bought their product, but insisting goes way too far.
- the_watcher 13y agoLooks like PayPal's strategy worked. Also, eBay used to be a much more unregulated (read: easy to spam/game) than it is now.
- notatoad 13y ago>buyers have no right to force sellers to accept a payment method that the seller did not support. sure they do. after you've won an auction or otherwise agreed to buy you are restricted to only the accepted payment methods, but before making a purchase you can contact a seller saying "i'll buy this if you can accept paypal"
- danielharan 13y agoYou could turn around and re-sell those items, suggesting buyers use Paypal :)
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jfoster 13y agoI'm currently reading the PayPal Wars book cited, and I haven't come across them buying items yet. There are two things they did, which I have come across in the book: 1. They had a bot that would put a PayPal badge onto all of a seller's listings for the seller. 2. They provided buyers with a small amount of PayPal credit for free when they signed up for an account, so that the buyers would ask if they could pay with PayPal.
- gritzko 13y agoFrom what I heard, the BitTorrent inventor bootstrapped the network with free porn.