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And this is why PayPal makes me nervous
Jul. 2nd, 2014 03:39 pmA week or two ago, I mentioned the crowdfunding project for ProtonMail, a secure email platform based in Switzerland. Today's little fillip to that story is that PayPal apparently (in that way PayPal does) peremptorily cut off their funding for no good reason. Of course, PP claims that this was just a mistake, but it fits too closely with too many other stories I've heard.
All of which cuts a bit close to home. Sometime next year, Querki is going to have to start taking memberships, and that is inevitably going to require getting in bed with *some* sort of solid payments processor. And the truth is, in a lot of ways I'd actually *like* that to be PayPal: I like the general design of the service, and have been a member for many years. (And while, yes, their security may not be 100% airtight, it is *vastly* better than the credit card system in general.) But I just don't know whether I can trust them enough to use them for a key business service -- they have too much history of screwing over their customers on a whim.
I really do wonder whether PP is really as clueless as they seem to be, about how much damage they have done themselves through too many arbitrary decisions. They've wound up opening the door to competitors (including Amazon, as well as a host of other players) who would be *more* than happy to steal their business. And it's exactly the startups who tend to choose a processor and then stick with it for a fair while who they are driving away...
All of which cuts a bit close to home. Sometime next year, Querki is going to have to start taking memberships, and that is inevitably going to require getting in bed with *some* sort of solid payments processor. And the truth is, in a lot of ways I'd actually *like* that to be PayPal: I like the general design of the service, and have been a member for many years. (And while, yes, their security may not be 100% airtight, it is *vastly* better than the credit card system in general.) But I just don't know whether I can trust them enough to use them for a key business service -- they have too much history of screwing over their customers on a whim.
I really do wonder whether PP is really as clueless as they seem to be, about how much damage they have done themselves through too many arbitrary decisions. They've wound up opening the door to competitors (including Amazon, as well as a host of other players) who would be *more* than happy to steal their business. And it's exactly the startups who tend to choose a processor and then stick with it for a fair while who they are driving away...