

Mobile-Payment Startups No Match for PayPal - rmah
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-08-19/mobile-payment-startups-no-match-for-paypal-tech.html

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mattmaroon
Anecodote: We've switched to Stripe and Paypal (from Paypal's merchant
solution only) and are happy to have pushed about 50% of our processing away
from them. But we probably won't get much past that. As much as the developer
experience sucks, a lot of customers love using it, especially
internationally.

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samspenc
Can you explain what you mean by "Stripe and Paypal"?

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jusben1369
They stopped using PayPal as a Payment gateway for credit cards and PayPal and
switched that out for Stripe. They still accept PayPal as a payment type (via
PayPal as Stripe doesn't support PayPal as a payment type)

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mattmaroon
Correct. Mostly because we had a very low amount of charge backs (something
like a fraction of a percent of what we process in a year, which for our
industry is phenomenal) and PayPal instituted a hold on some of our funds.

Stripe is easier to implement, but at our scale that's not really a huge
factor. The dev time for any payment system isn't a significant limitation.

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qq66
Part of the problem here is that VCs have funded 100 competitors instead of 5.
In a commodity business, you only get profitability at huge scale, and a lot
of problems like internationalization and fraud prevention to boost revenues
and margins take a lot of investment. And the companies that succeed with
gimmicks to get a bunch of early traction with an unprofitable 1% or 0%
business model aren't necessarily the ones that will be good at solving the
thornier problems down the road.

5 VC-funded companies with $60m each would be better equipped to take on
PayPal than 100 companies with $3m each.

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joonix
If it's a commodity business then take your capital out and trade pork bellies
from home instead.

Regardless I'm quite pleased with Stripe and I'm not a developer. I just use
it with a mobile app.

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thinkcomp
This is a pretty misleading story. It doesn't address the regulatory issues in
the market whatsoever.

Olga Kharif also reported in 2011 that the iPhone 5 would have NFC. See
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-25/apple-plans-
service...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-01-25/apple-plans-service-that-
lets-iphone-users-pay-with-handsets.html). (It doesn't.)

PayPal's general counsel testified at the DFI (now DBO) oversight hearing in
Sacramento in March, 2013, which was initially scheduled for November, 2012 to
take place not at the state capitol, but at PayPal's San Jose headquarters.
Clearly the regulations matter to them.

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jusben1369
I'm not sure I understand what you mean? The story is essentially one of an
overcrowded marketplace with too many startups going after too small an amount
of business and the disaster that looms.

