Draft Media Release re PayPal

“It is with great sadness that eBay’s Chief Headless Turkey, John Donahoe, announces the probable demise of eBay’s most ugly daughter, PayPal. Donahoe says that PayPal is likely to be stricken by particularly virulent strains of Visa+CyberSource and Mastercard Open Platform, and these afflictions are greatly aggravated by PayPal’s insurmountable lack of direct financial institutions support and a great deal of PayPal merchant dissatisfaction, particularly with respect to PayPal’s grossly unfair, “all responsibility avoiding” user agreement, primitive risk management processes, and grossly unprofessional, buyer-biased and fraud-facilitating (indeed, apparently non existent) transactions mediation, to name just a few of the problems that PayPal merchants have to endure.

“Donahoe says that PayPal’s health may therefore be expected to deteriorate and, if ultimately not completely incapacitated, will most likely be eventually confined to its mandatory offering on what little there will be, by then, left of the Donahoe-devastated eBay marketplaces. There is no cure for this condition, and the “eBafia Don” is particularly saddened by the inevitable presumption that it is unlikely that PayPal, will be able to continue to underpin eBay’s sagging bottom line too far into the future.”

Yes, it’s a send-up but, still, it accurately describes PayPal’s most unprofessional and “clunky” operation. The fact is, had the developers of the original “bankcard” concept ever behaved the way PayPal behaves towards its payees in particular, credit/debit cards may never have gotten off the ground, and we would probably still be paying for all our purchases with bits of paper and little metal discs.

It should also be emphasized that all the payments processors that do not have the direct underlying risk-managing and real transaction mediation support of the financial institutions that are ultimately involved in the transaction, as does the likes of Visa/Mastercard, suffer the same handicaps that PayPal suffers. The “banks” may be disliked by some but they at least supply a “professional” payments processing service.

Any off-eBay merchant thinking of voluntarily offering PayPal would be wise to first peruse the very many PayPal merchant horror stories that abound on the internet. A detailed examination of and prognosis for PayPal, (including a link to the “PayPal Horror Tour”) at:
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=23309

Shill Bidding on eBay: Case Study #4
This latest study provides an indication of eBay’s desperation to mitigate lessening sales activity and very effectively demonstrates eBay’s effective aiding and abetting of criminal shill bidding “wire fraud” activity by unscrupulous professional sellers on unsuspecting buyers:
http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=23540

eBay/PayPal/Donahoe: Dead Men Walking.