Comment by davidpoarch | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidpoarch | Hacker News Reader

The article states: "[WePay's] ambition: to move beyond what WePay calls the “unstructured economy” to be the dominant way people make payments and buy things online. ...Since WePay can’t yet match PayPal’s brand or awareness, it aims to offer more appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service."

If WePay intends to overtake PayPal, I think it will need to do more than that. An "appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service" are easy to replicate.

How about thinking out of the box and re-engineering the system? How about focusing on and addressing PayPal's weaknesses? How about creating a system that inherently includes automatic fraud prevention (for both buyers and sellers)? How about minimizing (nearly eliminating) all dispute resolution scenarios? How about extending such protection to the services marketplace (as opposed to just products)? How about creating a truly globalized payments platform (there are several countries where PayPal fails because credit cards are not used or available as the main form of payment)?

I am a co-founder of a nascent third party payments aggregator (TPPA) called PayGuard. We are currently building our Beta, and our system addresses all these issues.

I think the biggest asset would simply being "not PayPal". PP has been cultivating a bad PR problem lately and systems like these will have a social lock-in effect. Not quite as bad as Facebook vs Google+ but people would be reluctant to wander too far out of bounds, especially when bank accounts are concerned.

You seem to have some great goals yourself, however. Good luck to you!

Actually it is the sellers that PayPal is turning off. Their dispute resolution policies are abstruse and keep changing in their attempt to protect buyers. They have relied too heavily in freezing, closing, and even withdrawing money from sellers’ accounts without prior notice. So many eBay sellers who have relied on PayPal had their entire businesses destroyed with one incident. A payment system that focuses on preventive security would not rely on such heavy handed tactics when resolving disputes between buyers and sellers. If all users (buyers and sellers) have an equal distribution of control during the entire transaction then incentives for committing fraud on both sides will be effectively eliminated. Right now one party gets paid then the other has to wait for his merchandise. PayGuard will solve these problems. The challenge now is to get people to start trusting new players in the market.

Agreed. All WePay needs to do is to scour the collective horror stories of PayPal screwups, find equitable solutions, and build up street cred.

Of note: WePay mentions that monies are held in a real bank account - IMHO, this is a huge plus over PayPal who only pretends to be a bank.

>An "appealing design, an expedited set-up process and better customer service" are easy to replicate.

For any bigco the size of paypal to replicate it, they would first need to realise they are doing it wrong. Which requires a relatively large critical mass of people in the management chain to accept that they've been doing it wrong. That will never happen. And then there's the technical issues of going from wrong way to right way without interrupting service. That likely requires a lot of very skilled people, many of whom probably left for greener pastures when they first saw the "wrong way" sign.

Those juggernauts just cannot turn on a dime.

It's amazing how bureaucracy can make it difficult for large companies to make simple changes. I think we should create a better model for running large organizations. The "flat" model seems to be promising but is still not sufficient to fight the inertia that is built during a company's growth stage. Maybe decentralization if done correctly will work.

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