PayPal might still be the sweetheart, but there's no innovation I feel. With eBay having CC support and being able to charge and return a charge back to the card, PayPal now is in a niche. I'm helping a founder recruit. To handle the load of candidates, we give folks applying some $ for doing a small 1hr project, and Claude told me that PayPal may still be universal way of sending a "gift amounts". I often wonder how much work would it be to bring IBAN accounts to the US. The need for Zelle baffles me, and the fact that person A can't send $ to person B via normal bank infrastructure is interesting.
I'm from Europe and like Paypal a lot for paying for things online; much easier than using a credit card.
Paying with CC: typing the 16 digits of the CC, expiration date, 'CVC', and then having your phone nearby for confirmation. Happens on a myriad of forms from various providers that may or may not save or log the CC number. Many times the text message doesn't arrive on time on your phone, which makes the transaction fail. Or you have reached your credit card 'limit' and the transaction also fails (without you knowing why).
Paying with Paypal: username and password (or password only if the username is saved), done. Happens only on the Paypal website. Funds are withdrawn immediately from your bank account if you want. Never fails.
Who considers PayPal a sweetheart?! PayPal is by far one of the most heinous companies I have interacted with on a regular basis.
Outside the US many banks offer simple QR payment options, the direct transfer difficulties US citizens encounter that make services like PayPal and Zelle necessary are entirely self imposed.
Agree that nobody considers it a sweetheart but you're wrong on the ex-US issue. Paypal is big in Germany for instance and I literally know nobody who uses Paypal in the US (maybe for eBay stuff??)
Probably not very long. Multiple companies, including Amazon, started supporting Wero for payments. And most banks already support it. You scan a QR code or open a link that opens your bank app, show your fingerprint, see the amount and which account and to who, and you approve. Very easy and costs nothing to the seller nor the buyer.
Next year we'll get this in the physical stores...
A tongue in cheek comment from me is that in Spain we have all this beautiful infrastructure but no money to send. I would rather have money to send via a slightly more inconvenient infrastructure.
The euro payment scenario has changed drastically in the last few years and it's a good thing for customers: yesterday I was able to pay a US company with Bizum through Stripe.
Many countries including European now have just scan a QR code. The EU payment scheme Wero is bringing that cross-border for EUR. Instant and very low fees.
Not by default. Deutsche Bank for instance makes you select it and I'm guessing most people are afraid that choosing instant means a fee so they leave it off.
> In europe you just send money to their IBAN or they send you a link
You can, but at least in Germany people are reluctant to give their IBAN to others and prefer one degree of separation, so PayPal is still very common for transfers between friends.
My wife recently filled out a SEPA-Lastschriftmandat for an account in my name and all she needed was my name, IBAN address and a signature. Name and Address is semi-public and signatures can be faked. I'm no financial criminal but I would be shocked if there was no attack vector that gets enabled from knowing an IBAN and a name.
The thing is, burden of proof is with the bank. For a lastschrift, you have 8 weeks to reverse it, if you didn't actually sign the Ermächtigung, you have 13 months.
Unless you don't care what transfers happen, that's pretty much always enough time
I am not worried about the money staying gone forever and I have ample cash reserves, but I can imagine that someone who might have to worry about a bouncing rent wire or electricity bill would be more worried about their safety cushion potentially being gone until they get it fixed with their bank.
Paypal (as an example) only asks for the name and IBAN and they do identity verification themselves, by depositing (!) a small amount of money on your account.
But yeah, it's a very high-trust society. Of course any charge can be reverted via your bank app in seconds. But it's still a nuisance to have to check, so people are wary of giving it away.
The IBAN is also used for paying online by debit note. So somebody who knows your IBAN can theoretically buy stuff using your bank account. You can easily reclaim that money, but still there is hassle involved.
Because it's a convenient lower tech solution where you don't need to be a merchant with access to the debit card system to get monthly (or one-off) money, and it's easy to take or give back money.
As other comments say, it's also trivial to claim back a fraudulent charge, it's exposed directly in every online bank system UI.
In Germany, it’s not uncommon for people to not have a credit card. For online purchases, it’s therefore easier to use PayPal at checkout because a direct IBAN transfer or debit card might not be accepted by the merchant. Also for splitting smaller amounts among friends and family (less of a moat because this could be done in principal by a SEPA transfer).
In other countries Revolut is popular for the friends and family bill splitting, in places like Sweden they have a PayPal-like solution offered by local banks. There’s an upcoming initiative by Brussels to bring all these national initiatives under one umbrella, which would definitely hurt PayPal’s German revenue in future.
But you have a Visa/Mastercard, surely? A thing with 16 digits that you can plug into the Stripe checkout screen?
I have, but never use, a 'credit card'. The thing I use every day is a 'debit card', where the money comes straight from my account. But it still has 16 digits and Visa written on the front.
In 2019, only 20% of Germans had a Visa/Mastercard. The vast majority of Germans used the German GiroCard network, as many vendors refused Visa/Mastercard due to the higher fees (2-3% vs GiroCard's 0.125%), and there was no real need for it. Even 2019 you had to pay 30-50€/year fee just for a debit MasterCard/Visa, as Germans rarely used them and rarely went into overdraft, so there was little profit to be made.
Since then MasterCard has tried to force banks into dropping GiroCard, by refusing to work with smaller banks that still support GiroCard, and by offering better conditions to larger banks that drop GiroCard.
This has increased the number of Germans with Visa/MasterCard, but it's still below 50%.
AFAIK, it's actually the "not-really-banks" that don't have Girocard: N26, Revolut, bunq, Vivid, Trade Republic, Wise, Tomorrow, Openbank.
All the traditional large ones seem to have AFAIK.
Off topic but I really hate N26 and its ilk. They don't really follow the German laws that say that German residents can have bank accounts, so they refuse people that are still on work visas, which is a pain in the fucking ass when you have a startup and the young employees are telling the immigrants "get N26" or something else, but the immigrants can't have it and only learn after submitting lots of docs to N26.
Germany: Younger people yes, older people no. They wouldn't know the difference between credit and debit card and everything that looks like a credit card is an invention from hell and instant debt-spiral to them.
What are you talking about - merchants not accepting debit cards? It's best option for them.
People used to use Paypal because they have only debit cards. But with better card security and alternatives like SEPA and Wero there is way less need.
> For some reason PayPal is still quite big in Germany; about 28% of online revenue in 2025.
Many Germans don't have credit cards (I don't), so PayPal is pretty convenient as it can withdraw directly from a SEPA account and enables online shopping.
Google Pay cannot do SEPA, but allows adding PayPal as a payment method, so PayPal also gets you into the Google purchase ecosystem.
Revolut with its virtual CCs has been making some inroads lately, though.
Paypal is somewhat common in Italy for lunch-money amounts, a few local alternatives are available (sumUp and Satispay mainly) but for anything more than 100€ everybody uses SEPA transfers.
US bank accounts don't have IBAN? I thought IBAN numbers were part of the whole Swift system that Russia got locked out of. Shows how much I know about this stuff...
For as long as criminals believe they can hide in relative anonymity (e-mail, stolen CC and burner phone being sufficient authorization) and high volume of transactions PayPal will remain with us. It’s a great way to do small cash like transactions without going to crypto. Some crimes still need to source cash.
The past several transactions I've done with Zelle, it has taken 3-5 days for the money to arrive. This was with a contact I sent money to before using Zelle (my brother), and also a new contact. I'm surprised because my experience has always been Zelle was instant. Has something changed with Zelle? The bank I am using is Ally.
Nothing's changed with Zelle AFAIK, but the time it takes depends on the sending bank, the receiving bank, the amount of money, the history of both parties, arbitrary fraud metrics decided by both banks and EWS themselves and some other things. Sometimes they just decide that your transfer won't be instant.
I mistakenly opened a Bank of America account last year, but they had so many fraud protections on Zelle it was nearly impossible to use without constantly getting transfers held up for days and having to make phone calls to banking support to approve transactions and verify my identity, and it was such an absolute nightmare I will never ever bank with them again or recommend them to anybody. The worst part was absolutely the phone calls, I could never dismiss or approve anything online I always had to make a phone call during business hours.
Then I moved to US Bank and they support instant Zelle transfers, recurring Zelle transfers (which both my credit union and Capital One didn't support!), approving fraud alerts online and more, the only way I could be happier with them is if they had less security theater (like Mercury) but I'll be moving to Mercury anyway once they support Zelle.
Technically yes, because Zelle is just the frontend, but banks can settle between themselves via ACH if they don't have another arrangement or a RTP (real time payment) setup.
To answer the original question, because Zelle is ran by a consortium of banks, they all trust each other enough to release funds immediately and settle up overnight if need be.
Zelle isn't the ACH or RTP though, is what I'm saying. Zelle is the real-time notifications and accounting, but the reason every bank needs to have bespoke support is because it's each bank's job to figure out how to do the actual funds transfers in the background after Zelle payments go through.
> I often wonder how much work would it be to bring IBAN accounts to the US
It is 2026, in USA people are not having access to IBAN in their bank accounts, usually they have to be personally present for international transfers out of their accounts and everyone have a checkbook.
Sometimes. In USA they may require one check for parties of >N (where N can be 6). Some (fancy) places won't split at all. Then consumers juggle apps to square up the deal.
> The takeover interest has helped it recover, with PayPal shares jumping more than 40% this quarter to give the company a market value of about $52.6 billion.
Seems like they tried to buy a struggling company and leaks of the talks made it too expensive.
It's not a struggling company. I run an e-commerce website. I give people the option to use either Stripe or PayPal. I would say it's a 50 50 split. The company is making $5 billion in profit a year. What's wrong with people?
Yeah the "struggling company" is a bit too harsh of a statement. What they likely were talking about was the stock price. It was getting hit pretty hard and the Stripe deal talks saw confidence which led to the stock price getting back up and now the market value for the company is actually higher than what Stripe is offering in the deal so it doesn't make sense to sell lower at this point of time.
PayPal originally took off as it was convenient and fast, saving you from filling in card details each time and it also allowed sending payments for private transactions using only an email address
Since then Apple Pay/Google pay/browser wallets have taken a big chunk of its fast checkout advantage
And mobile banking apps/instant transfer have taken out chunks of the private transactions, and more so as consumer to consumer transactions often had the parties using PayPal gift mode to avoid fees but that then had zero protection.
The 2020’s is much more crowded than 1990’s and 2020’s decades
Also it was its partnership with eBay that made it dominant and eBay no longer promote PayPal as preferred payment method.
Sometimes it's the other way around. Lockers for packages were first introduced in Germany (Packstation) then they were rolled out in the US almost a decade later.
Not having a lot of credit cards and the associated rewards is actually healthy. Research has shown lower social classes "pay" for the rewards due to paying the higher transaction fees. There was actually a relevant thread here a few days ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201 (How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer)
The other consistently supported thing is card numbers. I generate virtual card numbers for every merchant, no need for some suspicious interloper. For non-recurring or one-off transactions -- new virtual card for each purchase.
Yes it's basically every website in Australia you can pay via PayPal now. I use it less and less since Apple Pay is available pretty much everywhere, but it can still be handy now and then.
PayPal is, unfortunately, not dead. It's used by RMV in Germany for a start - only way to pay for a bus ticket in the app/website. No credit or debit card, straight up PayPal account.
PayPal is still the default processor in so many places. That's got to be worth something. Every other time I buy something online, PayPal is the default option.
Can folks responding to this comment claiming that they see PayPal a lot provide some details? Country, industry, sector, something. I'm in the US and I basically never see it on e commerce checkout flows any more (and good riddance IMO).
In European online shopping it's very common for everything thats not ment for only one country.
Within Switzerland there is zero need for PayPal do you don't see it as much, but if you ship to Germany or Italy things start to get more complicated.
Generally I would use it on smaller / unfamiliar websites; I may be more hesitant about entering my credit card numbers but also it's quicker and easier as I can do it without getting my card out of my bag.
Yeah this is my primary use case for using PayPal. I use it on e-commerce sites for first purchase or if it's unlikely I'm going to buy anything from the same site again.
I don't see it as much as before but recently I had issues with paying z.ai with my card and the only payment alternative they have is PayPal. PayPal now requires an account with a verified phone number just to process your payment, so it's strictly a no-go for me.
I am guessing the millions of people they have on-boarded in the last decades are what makes the business worth something.
Elon bought a dead social network and look at him go! But seriously, I log into paypal once a month to pay my landlord. I am a MAU. That is crazy. It’s more then I can say for ABNB. Maybe they should buy Paypal. Save on those transaction fees.
I wish Twitter had been dead when Elon bought it, but no, Twitter was far from dead. X actually has fewer MAU as far as I can tell[1], and I wouldn’t call it dead either.
[1]: Seriously though, I can’t find good data I trust on this so correct me if you’ve got a good source saying otherwise, or even if someone has something substantiating this better I would take that too.
The social network is more dead than when he bought it. Wouldn’t need the an acquisition first by an ai company and then a space company to hide its worth.
I honestly wish they could've succeeded because PayPal is one of the banes of my existence. They're one of those faceless corporations that accuse everyone of money laundering in order to steal their shit.
They held and stole quite a bit of money from my company when it was small 'for fraud'; it was a very hard time, and of course there was no fraud. It was a long time ago and I don't get angry anymore, but it was a nightmare and nothing you can do. Since then I moved to local processing, issuing, acquiring; I can thank Paypal for all of that. Hope they die a miserable death, but I guess 50B$ says at least the managers will drive their lambo's/yachts around no matter what happens unfortunately.
Paypal stole over $10k from a Haitian charity drive we did. They froze the account and all the donations, then refused to refund people and offered "Donate to our charity instead" as an option.
Suing over borders. Did I mention small company? What would it cost me, in 2007, to sue a US company from my country in europe? With what chance of winning?
It would be small claims court and they are being sued so much, that they don't even bother to show up in trials (courts are expensive goes both ways), so it is default win usually.
I am not sure about the year 2007, but in 2026, they need to be under your monetary authority somehow. That's why most crypto exchanges do not offer service in Europe. Your monetary authority might have a form or an email for complaint and depending on how pro-active they are, they can make the other counter-party very proactive.
I've deleted my PayPal account last year and haven't regretted it. Admittedly it helped a lot that I live in Norway now where everyone uses Vipps (which is so much better), and PayPal is not a thing at all.
Do you never order stuff online from outside of scandinavia? I've used it extensively for over a decade with zero issues and still find it the best payment method for online shopping if you are a consumer. You only need an email to send money everywhere in the world and almost everyone supports it. No need to hand out your actual credit card or banking info to random websites with questionable security. And if you do get scammed, it's trivial to get your money back. So I totally understand some small merchants who don't want to receive from papal, but I don't understand why a consumer would not want it.
There are entire countries where it's not a thing to use PayPal. Way too many people were scammed out of their money by them. In general you don't give your credit card number to random sites - it mostly goes to Stripe and similar services.
These days stripe is perhaps getting dominant, but there was an age before stripe and many small companies still have custom solutions. And how would Paypal scam you out of your money? I've only ever seen this happen to people who did illegal shit and even then you won't lose much unless you also use paypal to store money like a bank for some weird reason. But then you're definitely more of a merchant than a consumer, so it already sucks because of other reasons as mentioned above. If you use it only for sending payments, getting locked out is a non-issue, because there is no money stored there and I can always revoke their access to my bank account.
Well, baltics have access to the EU; Norway only in a limited manner. I noticed this when someone wanted to purchase magic cards and when I looked at the extra bureaucracy I decided to do something else with my time. (Note: this may not have been mega-fair to the customer in Norway, but at that time I did not yet know how insane the EU rules are, they are just a mega-hassle. Since then I simply give notice that I avoid shipping into Norway, Switzerland etc...; and the fault for this really lies in the EU, they make so many trivial things needlessly complicated.)
Other than that, often you will then rely on in-between traders.
I choose to go through the hoops of doing a bank transfer than through PayPal, if these two are the only options. It’s practices over the years are just terrible.
I've been wondering about this since it came up in my newsreader that they wanted to acquire PayPal. Seemed like odd timing to me given PayPal has been questionable but necessary in a lot of cases for online businesses in international payments.
In Canada, we use Interac for more ordinary payments between ourselves, and the usual credit cards through card processors like Moneris or bank provided services in physical stores. I can imagine fewer uses for PayPal as time goes on, especially with the accelerated change driven by geopolitics. Visa and Mastercard may be at risk internationally for other countries seeking to keep payment processing entirely in their own yard.
This matter in particular made me wonder how things will go for Stripe going forward with these policy changes that may impact credit cards.
I'd love to delete my PayPal account and never log in again, but the use case for me right now is mostly that companies (outside Canada, and outside NA in most cases) usually only accept payment with PayPal.
There is us fair competition law Sherman anti trust act laws. "is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce and consequently prohibits unfair monopolies"
I remember when it came out they promised crypto payments and what not and then it never actually delivered anything else than being another confusing option to use PayPal
PayPal is dying and not that slowly. It's being replaced by Stripe, Adyen, Checkout.com, Apple Pay, Google Pay... etc. margins continue to decrease with no real moat to rising competition. Eventually it will just be Venmo and Braintree left and PayPal will be a company like Western Union that people used to need, but now is mostly used by scammers... They completely squandered their spin off from eBay and acquired terrible companies along the way that didn't pan out really even one time. I wouldn't pay $25B for them. You're buying a depreciating asset.
I wonder if this year we see more acquisitions,
by volume in money, than in prior years.
I never got into PayPal and these days I shy away
from any Trump-tainted US companies - which basically
means I don't want my money to go into US companies.
Canada showed the way here.
Stripe is tiny compared to Paypal, and the dodgy Stripe CEO was trying to do some wildly creative financing and work the social media memes in an effort to pull this transaction off. Wall St. basically thought it was stupid and wouldn't support it. Glad he finally gave up -- he certainly got his money's worth of free publicity out of it.
None of this makes sense or is supported by the facts. Stripe is reportedly valued at $159B, PayPal's market cap is currently $52.59B, and your claims about memes and Wall St are asserted without any citations or facts.
I agree with you in principle but I don't think that market cap is the right metric. Market cap captures a lot of assumptions around product mix and growth rates that have been in Stripe's favor for a long time.
The most apples-to-apples comparison is just looking at payments volume and ignoring all their other products. In that case, Stripe just recently overtook PayPal! PayPal is enormous! But Stripe has that compounding growth on its side and GP's argument has become outdated in a short amount of time.
This is ignoring the bit about pc which I just disagree with.
But that value is not tested or backed by the wider market.
Market cap of paypal is.
Also having just spaffed "$8bn" on openrouter, I would be surprised that they have enough resources to get the ~$50bn to buy paypal. Much less the work it would take to integrate a much larger company in to the "stripe" way
Paying with CC: typing the 16 digits of the CC, expiration date, 'CVC', and then having your phone nearby for confirmation. Happens on a myriad of forms from various providers that may or may not save or log the CC number. Many times the text message doesn't arrive on time on your phone, which makes the transaction fail. Or you have reached your credit card 'limit' and the transaction also fails (without you knowing why).
Paying with Paypal: username and password (or password only if the username is saved), done. Happens only on the Paypal website. Funds are withdrawn immediately from your bank account if you want. Never fails.
Outside the US many banks offer simple QR payment options, the direct transfer difficulties US citizens encounter that make services like PayPal and Zelle necessary are entirely self imposed.
Next year we'll get this in the physical stores...
Paypal has actively lobbied for legislation(or lack of) in ways that has hurt American consumers.
- Bizum for national transfers, you just need someone's number (which you usually have through WhatsApp) representing 90% of instant payments
- SEPA payments also make bank transfers free and trivial for your European friends
But I think their time has passed.
Meanwhile in china you just scan a qr code.
In europe you just send money to their IBAN or they send you a link
Instant payments, no commission...
You can, but at least in Germany people are reluctant to give their IBAN to others and prefer one degree of separation, so PayPal is still very common for transfers between friends.
Are they worried people might send them money without their permission?
Unless you don't care what transfers happen, that's pretty much always enough time
I didn't know what it was so I clicked a few buttons in the app and the money was back instantly.
That was on Commerzbank. Dunno if others are the same!
But yeah, it's a very high-trust society. Of course any charge can be reverted via your bank app in seconds. But it's still a nuisance to have to check, so people are wary of giving it away.
Basically you do this with your bank and not the other way around with the merchant.
Is it common to check all your banking stuff every month to make sure there is nothing fraudulent? I don't see how this is practical
Also Austria, perhaps Italy, but I have less direct experience there.
In other countries Revolut is popular for the friends and family bill splitting, in places like Sweden they have a PayPal-like solution offered by local banks. There’s an upcoming initiative by Brussels to bring all these national initiatives under one umbrella, which would definitely hurt PayPal’s German revenue in future.
I have, but never use, a 'credit card'. The thing I use every day is a 'debit card', where the money comes straight from my account. But it still has 16 digits and Visa written on the front.
Since then MasterCard has tried to force banks into dropping GiroCard, by refusing to work with smaller banks that still support GiroCard, and by offering better conditions to larger banks that drop GiroCard.
This has increased the number of Germans with Visa/MasterCard, but it's still below 50%.
All the traditional large ones seem to have AFAIK.
Off topic but I really hate N26 and its ilk. They don't really follow the German laws that say that German residents can have bank accounts, so they refuse people that are still on work visas, which is a pain in the fucking ass when you have a startup and the young employees are telling the immigrants "get N26" or something else, but the immigrants can't have it and only learn after submitting lots of docs to N26.
My Girocard has Maestro integration, so I can use it overseas, but no number. Apparently this is gonna go away.
The Girocard naturally has ApplePay, which is what I use daily.
People used to use Paypal because they have only debit cards. But with better card security and alternatives like SEPA and Wero there is way less need.
Many Germans don't have credit cards (I don't), so PayPal is pretty convenient as it can withdraw directly from a SEPA account and enables online shopping.
Google Pay cannot do SEPA, but allows adding PayPal as a payment method, so PayPal also gets you into the Google purchase ecosystem.
Revolut with its virtual CCs has been making some inroads lately, though.
I mistakenly opened a Bank of America account last year, but they had so many fraud protections on Zelle it was nearly impossible to use without constantly getting transfers held up for days and having to make phone calls to banking support to approve transactions and verify my identity, and it was such an absolute nightmare I will never ever bank with them again or recommend them to anybody. The worst part was absolutely the phone calls, I could never dismiss or approve anything online I always had to make a phone call during business hours.
Then I moved to US Bank and they support instant Zelle transfers, recurring Zelle transfers (which both my credit union and Capital One didn't support!), approving fraud alerts online and more, the only way I could be happier with them is if they had less security theater (like Mercury) but I'll be moving to Mercury anyway once they support Zelle.
To answer the original question, because Zelle is ran by a consortium of banks, they all trust each other enough to release funds immediately and settle up overnight if need be.
It is 2026, in USA people are not having access to IBAN in their bank accounts, usually they have to be personally present for international transfers out of their accounts and everyone have a checkbook.
I've even had people refuse cash because they want me to "venmo" them or whatever stupid app they prefer.
Americans are super weird about dining procedures and expectations. Remember, we tip here. It's weird.
> The takeover interest has helped it recover, with PayPal shares jumping more than 40% this quarter to give the company a market value of about $52.6 billion.
Seems like they tried to buy a struggling company and leaks of the talks made it too expensive.
Confirmation bias.
It's still the only consistently supported thing I encounter online.
I'm aware things like Wero are poised to shake things up, but still have no real idea about timeline and impact.
Since then Apple Pay/Google pay/browser wallets have taken a big chunk of its fast checkout advantage
And mobile banking apps/instant transfer have taken out chunks of the private transactions, and more so as consumer to consumer transactions often had the parties using PayPal gift mode to avoid fees but that then had zero protection.
The 2020’s is much more crowded than 1990’s and 2020’s decades
Also it was its partnership with eBay that made it dominant and eBay no longer promote PayPal as preferred payment method.
Moving to Germany from the US was like entering a timewarp. PayPal is still real??? People use it??
I get it now but it's a pretty big miss that GiroCard couldn't figure out how to displace them after all this time.
Not having a lot of credit cards and the associated rewards is actually healthy. Research has shown lower social classes "pay" for the rewards due to paying the higher transaction fees. There was actually a relevant thread here a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201 (How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer)
Well, I used to live and work in South Korea for many years, so both DE and the US are about equally oldschool in my book :)
Card number is standard, with an increasing amount of places supporting Apple Pay (thankfully)
Also, it's often the way people transfer money between each other.
online is dead too, no app uses paypal, and plenty of online merchants take credit cards more than paypal; they even offer their own credit cards.
paypal hasn't innovated at all in over a decade, and people are scared of the way it will hang on to your money with little recourse.
You have already lost your plot with that claim. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it is not widespread.
PayPal is the payment method I use for Google Pay, so pretty much everything goes through it.
(I don't have a credit card, which is common where I live.)
Within Switzerland there is zero need for PayPal do you don't see it as much, but if you ship to Germany or Italy things start to get more complicated.
Generally I would use it on smaller / unfamiliar websites; I may be more hesitant about entering my credit card numbers but also it's quicker and easier as I can do it without getting my card out of my bag.
I also use it exclusively for eBay purchases.
It accounts for about 20% of my sales. I was about to write 'overwhelmingly Europeans' and I thought I better check. Nope.
I am guessing the millions of people they have on-boarded in the last decades are what makes the business worth something.
[1]: Seriously though, I can’t find good data I trust on this so correct me if you’ve got a good source saying otherwise, or even if someone has something substantiating this better I would take that too.
It was bonkers.
Other than that, often you will then rely on in-between traders.
In Canada, we use Interac for more ordinary payments between ourselves, and the usual credit cards through card processors like Moneris or bank provided services in physical stores. I can imagine fewer uses for PayPal as time goes on, especially with the accelerated change driven by geopolitics. Visa and Mastercard may be at risk internationally for other countries seeking to keep payment processing entirely in their own yard.
This matter in particular made me wonder how things will go for Stripe going forward with these policy changes that may impact credit cards.
I'd love to delete my PayPal account and never log in again, but the use case for me right now is mostly that companies (outside Canada, and outside NA in most cases) usually only accept payment with PayPal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act
Only Stripe knows.
1 month ago: Stripe and Advent have made a joint offer to acquire PayPal – sources https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48915953
I never got into PayPal and these days I shy away from any Trump-tainted US companies - which basically means I don't want my money to go into US companies. Canada showed the way here.
I agree with you in principle but I don't think that market cap is the right metric. Market cap captures a lot of assumptions around product mix and growth rates that have been in Stripe's favor for a long time.
The most apples-to-apples comparison is just looking at payments volume and ignoring all their other products. In that case, Stripe just recently overtook PayPal! PayPal is enormous! But Stripe has that compounding growth on its side and GP's argument has become outdated in a short amount of time.
This is ignoring the bit about pc which I just disagree with.
But that value is not tested or backed by the wider market.
Market cap of paypal is.
Also having just spaffed "$8bn" on openrouter, I would be surprised that they have enough resources to get the ~$50bn to buy paypal. Much less the work it would take to integrate a much larger company in to the "stripe" way
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckgp5ll3jd4o?app-referre...