Comment on Many such cases
wildncrazyguy138@fedia.io 4 months agoI think it’s that PayPal was one of the firsts to provide a method for collecting credit card transactions electronically.
Before PayPal, you’d often have to visit a website, then call the phone number for the seller to collect payment.
eBay needed paypal because their sellers were often not businesses, just people yardsaling stuff online.
Coincidentally, I interned at a PayPal competitor in 1998 that went under during the bust. We had an electronic interface through MS access, but it was a still a human entering in the CC number into one of those dial pads on our side and then confirming the transaction. I’m sure nowadays you can understand why that was a terrible long term business model.
tiramichu@lemm.ee 4 months ago
Thanks for the context. Here in the UK I never experienced a website that didn’t take payment via credit card directly as a first option - that’s always been there default, with some sites offering PayPal as a second or third way to pay.
And about punching the numbers manually then well, sometimes a bit of Mechanical Turk works just fine lol! :)
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 4 months ago
I deal with websites today that are optimized for PayPal first with worse second and third options.
A lot of websites with third party vendors rely on PayPal since it is the cheapest account for a seller with international access and PayPal handles the fraud investigation.
HootinNHollerin@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I don’t think you’re thinking of the same time frame though