PayPal is a global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to paying with traditional paper methods, such as checks and money orders.
PayPal is an acquirer, performing payment processing for online vendors, auction sites, and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee. It may also charge a fee for receiving money, proportional to the amount received. The fees depend on the currency used, the payment option used, the country of the sender, the country of the recipient, the amount sent and the recipient's account type.[4] In addition, eBay purchases made by credit card through PayPal may incur extra fees if the buyer and seller use different currencies.
On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay.[5] Its corporate headquarters are in San Jose, California,[2]United States at eBay's North First Street satellite office campus. The company also has significant operations in Omaha, Nebraska,Scottsdale, Arizona, Charlotte, North Carolina and Austin, Texas in the United States; Chennai in India; Dublin in Ireland;Kleinmachnow in Germany; and Tel Aviv in Israel. From July 2007, PayPal has operated across the European Union as a Luxembourg-based bank.
Contents
[hide]History
Beginnings
The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com.[6] Confinity was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company.[7] X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999, initially as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999.[8] Both companies were located on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Confinity's website was initially focused on reconciling beamed payments from Palm Pilots[9] and X.com's website initially featured financial services. Both services offered email payments as a feature.
At Confinity, many of the initial recruits were alumni of the Stanford Review, also founded by Peter Thiel, and most early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Max Levchin. On the X.com side, Elon Musk recruited a wide range of technical and business personnel, including many that were critical to the combined company's success, such as Amy Klement, Sal Giambanco, Roelof Botha[10] of Sequoia Capital, Sanjay Bhargava and Jeremy Stoppelman.[11]
To block potentially fraudulent access by automated systems, PayPal used a system (see CAPTCHA) of making the user enter numbers from a blurry picture, which they dubbed the Gausebeck-Levchin test.[12]
eBay watched the rise in volume of its online payments and realized the fit of an online payment system with online auctions. eBay purchased Billpoint in May 1999, prior to the existence of PayPal. eBay made Billpoint its official payment system, dubbing it "eBay Payments", but cut the functionality of Billpoint by narrowing it to only payments made for eBay auctions. For this reason, PayPal was listed in many more auctions than Billpoint. In February 2000, the PayPal service had an average of approximately 200,000 daily auctions while Billpoint (in beta) had only 4,000 auctions.[13][14][15] By April 2000, more than 1,000,000 auctions promoted the PayPal service.[16] 70% of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal payments, and roughly 1 in 4 closed auction listings were transacted via PayPal.[17] PayPal was able to turn the corner and become the first dot-com to IPO after the September 11 attacks.[18]
No comments:
Post a Comment