[thelist] Paypal

[Keith]

> I found this article about PayPal:
> 
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/technology/19NECO.html?pag
ewanted=al

That article is 7 months old, so let's bring it up-to-date. 

> the Better Business Bureau of Santa Clara County recently rated 
>PayPal's customer service unsatisfactory, 

The article was written before PayPal opened their customer 
service center (120+ employees) in Omaha. The BBB's current 
record for PayPal is at:
http://209.128.79.238/search/report.asp?k=210387

As for the article itself, it looks like the author was on the site less 
than ten minutes and took less than ten minutes to write the article. 
Journalism at it's best?

>There is no street address, phone number or e-mail address
>listed among the contact information on PayPal's Web site — just 
>a post office

Excuse me? There is a form for efficiently handling email customer 
support. But guess what, it doesn't have a field for "Stupid 
questions over the phone by clueless reporters who hope to quote 
our receptionist in a NYTimes article". Unlike the banking industry 
which just bolted the internet onto their decades old merchant-
model, PayPal is using the internet to reinvent that merchant-model 
with live-time accountability. Perhaps they believe in the internet too 
much by relying on email, a street address would be nice.

>Anyone who signs up to use PayPal, an Internet payment service 
>that has become popular among users of auction sites, must 
>provide it with a lot of personal data: name, telephone, address, e- 
>mail and credit card or banking information.

Which is kinda what you need to provide to make ANY internet 
payment, right? Somehow the author finds malicious intent??

The author insinuates that PayPal is something being run out of 
someone's basement because the author had a hard time finding 
the company's telephone number on the website.  Yeah right! 

15 days after the article PayPal completed it's second round of 
capitalization, $90 million. And that capitalization came while 
brokers at NASDAQ were wadding ankle deep in dot com blood 
folks. On Sept 28 it filed with the SEC for an IPO expected early 
next year. 

The author might have looked at the list of venture capitalists who 
are betting on that IPO:
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/investors-
outside . 
That list of kids don't play with kids working out of their basement. 
That list probably doesn't read the NYTimes either.

I do not want to start a list war over PayPal. I just think bad 
journalism begs to be kicked.

keith