eBay buy signals retail-as-a-service cloud

eBay has bought a tiny PHP specialist as a precursor to rolling out a massive cloud commerce platform-as-a-service for retailers, complete with an app-store fed by web developers. On Monday, the web giant said it had snapped up shopping engine specialist Magento, which will be merged with X.Commerce, an open-source platform …

[Philip Cohen]

eBay, Magento, AliExpress, Skype, PayPal, Google, Schmoogle, whatever

eBay, Magento, AliExpress, Skype, PayPal, Google, Schmoogle, whatever

The rusting old hulk eBay is presently being kept afloat by PreyPal so it’s good to see these boys recently squabbling and threats to the clunky PreyPal now coming thick and fast. It’s interesting times for all we eBay “haters” (oops, I mean “watchers”). I just hope that someone has remembered to bring the popcorn.

PayPal is mostly registered in various places not as a “bank” but only as a “money transmitter” (like Western Union), and PayPal actually claims that they are not a “payment processor”, and there is a minute degree of truth in that claim because it could, nonsensically, be claimed that they do no more than facilitate the transmission of money by riding on the back of the banks’ existing payments processing systems.

In fact, the only thing creative about PayPal has been their use of users’ email addresses as an identifier for online transactions. PayPal is otherwise no more than a blood-sucking parasite on, and in the main cannot function except via, the banks’ existing payments system (via their banker, GE Money Bank—Ugh!).

PayPal, outside of whatever will ultimately be left of the Donahoe-devastated eBay Marketplace, will undoubtedly eventually be consigned to the history books by all the retail banks/Visa/Mastercard once those players get their “online” act together.

Some people may not like “the banks” but all those participating retail banks at least supply a professionally run payments processing system—unlike PayPal’s—and even PayPal concurs with that assessment: except for intra PayPal “account” transactions, they use the banks’ payments processing system all the time and simply could not exist without it.

Regardless, all the above comments apply equally to all of the other third-party “payments processors” that are emerging out of the woodwork and wanting to have access to your banking account. Unless they a formal arrangement with all the participating retail banks, as do the likes of Visa/MasterCard, then the result is invariably going to be as potentially problematic as presently is PayPal’s clunky operation for its merchants, and many of them can tell you a sorry tale or two.

All anyone needs to know about the clunky PayPal can be found at:

http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=165263

Is that PayPal’s blood in the water, and are those “sharks” (oops, “banks”) I can see circling?

Enron / eBay / PayPal / Donahoe: Dead Men Walking.

[Fred Flintstone]

Paypal is more dead than you think..

.. as there is a new service negotiating capital investment that effectively nukes all online card fraud (no, it's not yet-another-mobile-phone gadget). Let's hope they get funds soon - I'm sick & tired checking my statements every month for fraudulent entries.

[Fred Flintstone]

Here we go again: privacy risks galore

It's all jolly well doing cloud-thingies, but the problem remains the same: as a customer, I don't know where my information is held, under which jurisdiction. We've already seen what can happen: you use a service in the UK and your data is extracted in a jurisdiction that doesn't worry too much about protection of private information (Twitter, anyone?) - that's going to be fun when credit card data is involved..

Clouds have very fluffy edges - beware.