Urgh. PayPal is the definition of stagnant. As a merchant, the experience hasn't changed over a decade. I have over a dozen workarounds for their bad interfaces for refunds, invoices, chargebacks, tax reporting, etc, user experiences.
I'm not clear on why they move so slow.
To be fair, across that broad range, nobody else is doing better than them. It just seems like given their position, I'd see more innovation. For example, what’s their response to Stripe? They seem to be on their laurels.
I always love to see innovation in the payment space. In the grand scheme of things, there was very little innovation until PayPal arrived, but there has been very little innovation post-Paypal arrival as well (compared to improvements in other areas).
My biggest worry with something like this is that small companies in the financial space can be here one minute, and gone the next.
I wonder what these guys are doing to establish their credibility and safeguard their future prospects as well as for their customers.
This was unique to PayPal in the previous decade since we were one of the few(only) tech platforms dealing with money then. Kinda fun to see other monetized tech platforms failing in spectacular ways. :)
I totally agree with you. It shouldn't be hard for Paypal to get better (and I don't understand why they don't), but to make something new that is better is a far more difficult proposition.
How much new can they really do as a payment processor?
I'm sure there's some little things they could dabble in but realistically the only things people want from Paypal are less fees, less account closures/theft from account holders, faster transfers and overall better customer support.
Paypal doesn't need to innovate, they need to fix the obvious issues that relegate their service to a "barely workable until the instant someone better comes along" paradigm.
Yes, before the founders sold out, Paypal was very novel and unique. Now they seem to be more interested in tying up people's money to use for float as their primary business model, rather than providing value as a transaction clearing house.
I'm currently in the middle of a crappy situation with PayPal. Anecdotal as that may be, I don't think they're ever going to "get better." Besides how they operate their business, their developer API is the work of 10+ years of legacy, cruft, and no innovation.
It's a testament to corporate inertia that PayPal hasn't been an innovator in payment processing for a long time. Square and Stripe have been making inroads, and Bitcoin is lurking out there somewhere. There's a fistful of money to be had in this arena, and I'm glad that it's evolved over the last few years.
This is a problem with most large companies. Once you reach a certain size, you encounter problems with scaling. Paypal is such a big company the only way they and other companies like them innovate is by acquiring other companies and teams because it's cheaper and easier.
The amount of friction within a company like Paypal I would imagine is quite high. Not even those at the top of companies like these can change things at the flick of a switch. Things move very slowly in large companies, this is why smaller startups are able to come along and shake things up so easily before being acquired. It is how it is.
You would not have to research any of them unless you believed I was making it up, and PayPal did not enter retail, mobile, micropayments, platforms, etc. All innovating means is making changes in something established, trying new things. PayPal innovated itself. It's not the same company today as it was pre-eBay; it's entered new countries, new channels, new lines of business. That's the answer to the question of whether PayPal has innovated since eBay. There was never a debate. Nobody else saw a debate; I'm not trying to win one, just frustratedly curious why you are trying to create one, and letting that frustration get the better of me when I should just be ignoring it.
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