I have called PayPal once before. The experience wasn't horrible, but it didn't leave me enthusiastic like Stripe's does.
Well, talking of facts small companies with a small customer base will always deliver better customer service than the larger ones. True test of these companies will come when their subscriber and customers run into millions(In paypal's case hundreds of millions).
Imagine a situation where where 283 million registered customers and probably more unregistered buyers. Ensuring operations related to that magnitude of people work fine for 99.99% of the people, 99.99% of the times. And then ensuring the remaining get appropriate customer support is not just difficult but requires a lot of work to maintain and run.
At that scale the founders will have a lot more different work to do. And addressing one user out of those hundreds of millions by communicating them on twitter might not scale properly. And the customer support employees are working in call center shifts. They are not going to be any more enthusiastic any more than other general call center employees.
Coming to arcane policies, Now for all those millions of users. There are definitely going to some x% of crooks out there gaming the system. Frankly speaking if you don't have such policies you may actually end up putting a lot of your other buyers and other customers in trouble and expose them to fraud. The problem is in programmatically handling hundreds of millions of users and their problems is not easy. You can build a system to do payments et al, but that's only beginning. So any good payment gateway etc will ultimately end up looking like PayPal.
PayPal works at a scale, Whether a new competitor will work at scale is question of time.
But don't write PayPal off, It actually works well for those hundreds of millions of registered and more unregistered users.
Well, talking of facts small companies with a small customer base will always deliver better customer service than the larger ones. True test of these companies will come when their subscriber and customers run into millions(In paypal's case hundreds of millions).
Imagine a situation where where 283 million registered customers and probably more unregistered buyers. Ensuring operations related to that magnitude of people work fine for 99.99% of the people, 99.99% of the times. And then ensuring the remaining get appropriate customer support is not just difficult but requires a lot of work to maintain and run.
At that scale the founders will have a lot more different work to do. And addressing one user out of those hundreds of millions by communicating them on twitter might not scale properly. And the customer support employees are working in call center shifts. They are not going to be any more enthusiastic any more than other general call center employees.
Coming to arcane policies, Now for all those millions of users. There are definitely going to some x% of crooks out there gaming the system. Frankly speaking if you don't have such policies you may actually end up putting a lot of your other buyers and other customers in trouble and expose them to fraud. The problem is in programmatically handling hundreds of millions of users and their problems is not easy. You can build a system to do payments et al, but that's only beginning. So any good payment gateway etc will ultimately end up looking like PayPal.
PayPal works at a scale, Whether a new competitor will work at scale is question of time.
But don't write PayPal off, It actually works well for those hundreds of millions of registered and more unregistered users.