Cringely on PayPal

from the making-money-off-breadcrumbs dept

Bob Cringely wrote a nice article about PayPal -- my micropayment provider of choice. For those of you that don't know PayPal, they're out to provide internet folks with an easy way to pay each other.. In return, they make money on the float. Kind of like the whole gift certificate business in the brick-n-mortar world -- except I imagine that reclaim rates are a lot higher online.
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  1. identicon
    mhh5, 7 Sep 2000 @ 3:03am

    Tell me why...

    Credit card companies aren't crushing paypal themselves?

    Also, why doesn't the following exist: a toll-free number for online credit-card purchases?
    It works like this:
    You go to a web site to buy something, you go thru all the hoops to pick what you want, it tells you some coded-number for your specific transaction, you dial up 1-800-wana-buy, you get a machine that asks you for your coded-number and credit card info, and it tells you your purchase is confirmed. You could even have the website dial most of the numbers for you, so you wouldn't have to do anything. Am I missing something? It could even use callerID to verify your identity.

    If anyone wants to start that company, at least acknowledge this techdirt post...

    link to this | view in thread ]


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