Posts with tag "PayPal"

CobWEBs Daily Edition podcast: Twitter numbers – the good, the bad, and the bullshit

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  • Posted 1283 days ago

cbn1-podpost Tonight’s show with myself and Mark starts off talking about the confirmed purchase of Gizmo5 by Google and the potential to provide a real viable threat to Skype. As I said in the show if I was Skype I would be feeling more than a little nervous right now.

From there we got distracted by a discussion about PayPal and how it is really a verifiable portable identification system that everyone is saying we need. Given PayPal’s recent opening of an API it is quite possible that a service could be built around this idea and still deal with the security concerns Mark raised about the idea.

We ended up the show talking about the whole discussion the last few days around Twitter’s stagnating, or declining, numbers. These are the same people who are using any one of the vast number of Twitter clients out there which will have an effect on the numbers that are suppose to be stagnating.

Posts referenced in the show

Trust assurance in open identity networks – SiliconAngle
Google Acquires Gizmo5 Soft Phone Service – SiliconAngle
Google Confirms Gizmo5 Purchase – The Inquisitr
Twitter may be gone by 2012, but we won’t be – Roy Bragg
Some thoughts on Twitters new ReTweet feature – Sean Bonner
Twitter In Trouble? I Smell Trolling At 100 Virtual Paces – The Inquisitr

Enjoy the show

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When small brick and mortar shops win

FTW-Kid Anyone who reads this blog regularly will know how I feel about businesses on the web who limit the ways that people can purchase stuff. Sure a growing number of sites selling stuff are adding the option to used bank/VISA debit cards but at this point that option only works if you live in the US. The rest of the time you are left with needing a credit card; which a large portion of our society doesn’t have.

Thankfully though, more of the larger web retailers are beginning to incorporate things like PayPal. It is things like this which is opening up new ways for consumers to spend there money. This has been the case for me recently as I found out that both TigerDirect.ca and the Steam Store (games) take PayPal for purchases. In the wake of that, and having the money to be able to do I have probably spent more of that money online in the last 6 months than I have since being online.

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Discussion Point: PayPal, Apple & Pirillo (podcast)

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  • Posted 1751 days ago

WinExtra Discussion Point Recently Chris Pirillo had the misfortune to have someone get his iTunes account password and help themselves to $450.00. Quite rightly Chris approached Apple for some resolution as well as PayPal to try for a reimbursement of his stolen money. Apparently apple fixed the flaw that allowed the theft but PayPal said they weren’t responsible because Chris had enabled the Preapproved Payment Agreement in his profile. My opinion on the matter is what the podcast discusses.

Reference Links:

PayPal Denies $450 of Unauthorized Charges :: Chris Pirillo
Pirillo Gets No Satisfaction From PayPal Support :: CenterNetworks

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Evernote might have been great

I’ve been lucky enough to be able to play around with Evernote ever since it was still in closed test. Granted I didn’t use it as much as I wanted being the hard core OneNote (Microsoft) user but that changed in the last little while if only to give Evernote a really fair shakeout. Due to this increase in usage and thinking that there could be some really interesting stuff beyond its already cool features I thought I would pony up the money and get the premium version of the program.

After all people deserve to be paid for their hard work so I dropped by the Premium purchase page to see how much it would cost me to upgrade. At first the upgrade price of $45.00 kinda set me back but still felt it was worth it when I had the money. Then I spotted the that was a complete deal breaker for me – see if you can spot it in the screen capture

Evernote Purchase - Gogle Checkout only

Yup – the only purchase option was Google Checkout. Sure you could use your credit card at that point but that didn’t matter one iota for me since I don’t have a credit card or a Google Checkout account. The one way I pay for everything online – including my web hosting – is with PayPal which was not supported here.

Yes I could very well keep on using the free version but that isn’t the point. I wanted to spend my hard earned money and be able to have access to all the extras that come with the premium version. Not anymore.

And another excellent program destined for the recycle bin because of myopic ideas of how people might like to pay for the products they really want.

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Why buying up web companies isn’t always in our interest

eBay buying PayPal reduced peoples choices. I was just reading Erik Schonfeld’s post over at TechCrunch about Amazon supposedly preparing a PayPal killer. As he quite right points out though – Amazon already has a payment system in place. How it can make it any more PayPal like is up for grabs but that isn’t the intent of this post to figure it out.

What I do want to talk about and was in part prompted by Erik’s post is that one of the driving forces on the Internet; and business in general really, is the unquenchable need to expand a company’s size and product range. Sometimes these acquisitions make sense and everyone involved is a winner. The company doing the buying, the company being bought and in many cases the customers of those products from the now joined companies.

In other instances though this isn’t always the case. Sure the company doing the buying may think that the purchase might fulfill some strategic need and the company being bought is happy because they get to walk away with a shitload of money. The third part of the equation though – the customer – sometimes ends up being the loser as suddenly options that they might have had before the purchase are gone.

Nowhere is this any clearer than when eBay decided that it would be an incredibly smart business move to buy PayPal. After all the service was being used by a large majority of vendors and buyers in their auction service. So it made perfect sense for them to buy the company.

As smart as that move might have been for eBay, and as happy as the owners of PayPal would have been for such a nice payday it was – as time has proven – the users of the service that have gotten the short end of the stick. While PayPal is recognized as being the premier payment and money transfer system on the Internet the moment that eBay bought PayPal we instantly saw the marketplace hit a stone wall.

The reason for this is because eBay the parent company is considered to be one of the top web businesses around with more competitors for shopper dollars than just about anyone else. Where once places like Amazon, Apple or any other major business on the web selling products directly to consumers might have considered supporting PayPal as a payment method that option disappeared the moment the ink was drying on the eBay purchase agreement.

As I have pointed out many times here at WinExtra not everyone has credit cards, US based debit cards or even lives in the US but because of one company deciding that it wanted to corner the market on e-commerce payments we ended up being the losers. I’m not suggesting that it was given that companies like Amazon, Apple or even Microsoft would have added PayPal as one of the payment options for their products but chances were a lot more likely before eBay stepped in the picture.

The end result though, is that a larger percentage of potential customers with money to spend are now locked out of the marketplace. In my opinion this is one case where companies buying companies has proven to be a detriment to the web as a whole.

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Not everyone has credit cards

To bad my money isn't good enough. I am sick and tired of wanting to buy software, books, hardware etc etc etc but I can’t. I am sick to death of sites that make you go through the whole sign up process to buy something and then and only then do they tell you they only take credit cards. I am pissed at companies wanting my business that don’t let me buy what I want because I don’t have a stupid ass credit card.

Here’s a hint to all you pain in the ass companies wanting to sell their goods on the Internet – not everyone in the frikken world has credit cards. No wonder your stuff gets pirated by otherwise honest people who like to be able to give you the money you deserve. However the moment you limit your sales to only those people who have those magical pieces of plastic you are hurting only yourself.

I have lost count of the number of times that I have wanted to buy a specific piece of software only to find out after having to jump through hoops that they don’t take PayPal. Tonight was a prime example as I went looking to buy a copy of ESET’s new release of their Smart Security Suite. Yes I know there are free antivirus programs out there but that is not what I wanted. I wanted to buy a product but nowhere on the site did it tell me about payment methods. No .. I first had to open an account with them and then go through 5 pages of information entry before finding out that they don’t accept PayPal. It was credit card or nothing.

And it’s not like they are alone on this as just about every major software company from Microsoft on down will only accept credit cards. Try buying something on Amazon without one – it ain’t gonna happen. Try buying anything from the iTunes store without a credit card – it ain’t gonna happen. For all the bragging about the success of e-commerce and how it is growing in leaps and bound it really is nothing more than a shadow of what it could be.

Not even taking into consideration the number of people who don’t; or won’t, use their credit card online there is also a very large portion of our society who don’t have the damn pieces of plastic. For them PayPal is the most used way to purchase goods online. Why do you think eBay bought up PayPal – because it realized this simple fact.

So to all you companies that make people jump through hoops only to find out you don’t take alternate methods of payment – piss off because the next time I want to buy something online and I don’t have an easy way to find your payment methods you’ve lost a potential customer – even if you do take PayPal.

To all those companies that don’t accept PayPal; or other payment types, you’re being stupid and missing out on good long term customers not to mention contributing to the piracy of your own software by people who very well could have willingly paid you for it.

Oh and thanks for making me feel like a second class citizen in world of online e-commerce.


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Miscellaneous Milestones

WinExtra Milestones can represent both good and not so good events; both of which I have experienced this week so far.

For the first time since getting serious about being a blogger and looking at ways to make WinExtra as self-sustaining as possibly I finally crossed the Google AdSense payout threshold of $100.00 and as a result got my first deposit from them. Mind you it took almost the better part of a year to get there and by the looks of things it will probably be another ten months; if I’m lucky, before I’ll see it happen again.

As much as I might have like to have gone out and splurged on some cool techie toy for myself – like an MP3 player to replace the one that my daughter and boyfriend decided to help themselves to or to get a new hard drive for my wife’s media machine – I instead applied the money to the phone bill so I can quit getting those irritating cut-off notices for at least a couple more months :)

In tandem with this event is that for the first time since I have been using PayPal to transfer money to my account it has actually cost me money (above the typical PayPal transfer fee) due to the conversion of US greenbacks to our Canuck funny money. It sure seems that the days of almost doubling the amount being withdrawn because of the stronger US dollar over our beaver bucks is long gone.

Hopefully that will change before my next AdSense check due sometime next year :)

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