Quite interesting that it fails to notice that Paypal et al seem to put the end user first, vs their customer (merchant), which makes customers push for merchants to accept paypal and eat costs or lose their business.
Admittedly, this is a bit simplistic, but credit card companies get that too: end users push bank's customers to eat the card company fees.
And as another example, the techy end-user base pushed for Google to become the default search engine down everyone's throats (I was part of the bandwagon too — what's not to like about bannerless, unbiased web index compared to Altavistas and Yahoos of the time and their "registries").
Paypal got huge help from integrating with eBay, where customers looked for merchants using it, until it became an obligatory payment method and was soon acquired by eBay.
Admittedly, this is a bit simplistic, but credit card companies get that too: end users push bank's customers to eat the card company fees.
And as another example, the techy end-user base pushed for Google to become the default search engine down everyone's throats (I was part of the bandwagon too — what's not to like about bannerless, unbiased web index compared to Altavistas and Yahoos of the time and their "registries").
Paypal got huge help from integrating with eBay, where customers looked for merchants using it, until it became an obligatory payment method and was soon acquired by eBay.