PayPal as Service, versus Method
August 20, 2011 Leave a comment
I put this in my Leap Frogs Category as it’s new to me (although it may not be to you).
Way back when, a few folks (including me) thought that the PayPal infrastructure could be elevated to be used as a payment method .. just like Visa, Mastercard, Discover, etc. In fact, there was a significant evangelism effort going on at the time, providing the necessary HTML code to include the PayPal image, secure interaction with nascent web services and the like.
From the image above, you’ll see that PayPal has up-leveled their game to provide a complete payment service, not only for their own payment method, but as agent to the other services who are ready to collect funds across the web. I’d be curious (and will poke about) to see if this was primarily a defensive move (to ensure they’d be a payment method), or a well-conceived (and decently executed) new business for the company.
Either way, nicely done.