New PayPal Tool Is Good News--For Whitman's EBay
forbes.com
Greg Levine, 06.17.05, 2:37 PM ET
A name synonymous with e-commerce made a move Friday to cement that status. Online payment service PayPal launched a new tool, which gives merchants the option of allowing consumers to complete credit card transactions on the merchants' own Web sites. The tool will preempt the need, and annoyance, of being redirected to PayPal's own site. The software allows Web sellers to run the checkout procedure as PayPal processes the deal in the background. Naturally, there will be a quid pro quo: the Website Payments Pro tool offer merchants greater customization even as it furnishes higher fees for PayPal. According to the CNet news service, PayPal is charging $20 monthly for Website Payments Pro, a flat fee of 30 cents per transaction, plus fees of 2.2% to 2.9% per transaction, depending on the total value processed. Any revenue innovation for PayPal is warmly welcomed by parent company eBay (nasdaq: EBAY). The Internet auctioneer, led by Chief Executive Meg Whitman, still outpaces such online-auction rivals as Yahoo! (nasdaq: YHOO). But like any firm that grows exponentially, eBay of late is suffering its growing pains--some users might say "agony"--from revamps that have rendered the site much more complex, harder to navigate and slower to utilize. |
