PayPal Mobile Launches - And It’s Awesome

March 22nd, 2006 at 10:29 pm

The original Paypal was a mobile solution designed to send payments on Palm devices. Mobile payment systems are quite popular in Europe and especially in Asia. It will be very interesting to see how this product tapes shape and if this industry(mobile payments)as a whole will sprout in the U.S. I have no reason to believe that it will not. Ebay…through paypal, definately has the user base to promote this new service to and to scale it up quickly.

March 22nd, 2006 at 11:35 pm

It always amazes me how Mastercard and Visa missed this boat. It’s a big potential market for them.

March 22nd, 2006 at 11:58 pm

this is even better than awesome. i hope businesses start accepting this soon.

if i had owned a restaraunt and wanted to be cool, i’d start accepting paypal mobile. people could come in, eat, and when the bill came, it would be paid in seconds. simple. easy. awesome.

hopefully, america will be soon be able to match the technological sophistication of some of our eastern friends.

March 23rd, 2006 at 12:40 am

when texting a phone or calling toll free, how do they confirm that it’s actually you calling/texting… isn’t caller-id easy to forge? my understanding is that the originating phone number sent with the call can be made up on the fly (it’s a feature!)…

you mentioned that on text-to-buy they call you back to confirm, but they don’t also confirm when sending payment view text or toll free?

am i missing something?

March 23rd, 2006 at 1:53 am

I can’t figure out if this is a US only service or if it will work for example in Sweden where I live. Does anyone here know?

March 23rd, 2006 at 2:04 am

Yes, this is a great improvement to paypal way of doing things.

but then again as said “This phone number cannot be activated for PayPal mobile. Only US, Canadian, and UK users can activate phones for mobile payments.”

March 23rd, 2006 at 3:07 am

here’s a link to a year old story about spoofing caller-id numbers.

http://blogs.washingtonpost.co.....s_lie.html

i’m not saying paypal mobile’s not a great idea, i just want to make sure that i’m the only one who can pay with my money…

March 23rd, 2006 at 6:25 am

It’s also not clear whether I can use PayPal Mobile to pay for what I mostly consume on my phone: mobile content. Do I really need to get out of my WAP browser (or bluepulse widget) and go send an SMS, then wait for the IVR callback, just to download a ringtone? Seems like carrier billing is still uncontested there.

And in the paying-restaurant-bill scenario, how long after I do my SMS-IVR thing does the waitperson serving my table get confirmation that my bill’s been paid and I should be allowed to leave? Because if the manager’s got to log in to PayPal on the PC in the office, or wait around for an SMS confirmation to come through, maybe I’ll just keep paying with my credit card for the time-being.

March 23rd, 2006 at 10:35 am

Michael (and others),

What’s your take on this technology with regards to the classified ads industry? I concur with certain issues raised regarding the use of charge cards versus PayPay Mobile, but, people selling items via classified ads generally don’t have a merchant account to accept charge cards and potential buyers may not want to carry large sums of money, or may not want to make an additional trip to the bank/atm to acquire funds prior to checking an item at someone’s premises. Also, sellers are generally reluctant to accept personal checks from buyers. As someone pointed out earlier, this could be useful to buyers/sellers participating in garage sales. I see this technology spilling over into the classified ads industry in a very positive way (especially if frequent flyer miles are involved down the road). May have a negative impact on Ebay and freight companies with regards to local purchases via online classified ads.

March 23rd, 2006 at 11:24 am

UK and European users are covered in this area by a British start-up called Mobile Sense (http://www.mobile-sense.com/). They’ve had a working system up for over half a year, built by strong team which spun out from Orange.

March 23rd, 2006 at 10:59 pm

I would be very interested in learning from responsible journalists, whether another company owns some IP around the call back security functionality. Call it the skeptical lawyer in me. Seems PayPal ripped off TextPayMe directly not only with this unique feature, but also with the UI. I bet with a lot of certainty that you will find some interesting IP issues here that are potentially dangerous to eBay.

March 24th, 2006 at 7:30 am

I bet that within 6 months Google will launch Google Mobile Payments!

March 24th, 2006 at 10:37 am

I got 5 on it has never been easier before !!!

March 28th, 2006 at 7:43 am

Yes, it appears you can activate on a land line as well.

March 28th, 2006 at 9:47 pm

ONE BIG PROBLEM.
This system doesn’t change the policies and procedures surrounding how PayPal actually delivers money- and there’s a couple big inconveniences- to be more specific- DELAYS.
If I pay you with via PayPal (mobile or traditional) and I have the funds come out of my checking account, you will have to wait 4 DAYS or so for those funds to be available in your PayPal account- more if you want to then transfer them into your own back account.
Should I choose to have the funds pulled from my credit card- you have to upgrade to a Premium/Business Account and pay 2.9% to receive the funds.

I tried having my roommates pay me their share of the utilities with PayPal, but it was a week before I would have the money.

No good.

March 28th, 2006 at 11:40 pm

That is quite old. In Germany there was a company already in 1998 that has provided tha same service called paybox.

March 29th, 2006 at 6:25 am

And PayPal will skim their 5% or more from what goes through them. Nice idea but they always take too high a percentage.

March 30th, 2006 at 6:30 pm

Thats pretty sweet. No more “I’ll pay you later” from someone who doesn’t usually. Now you can just say, “text me”.

April 10th, 2006 at 3:07 am

Tea Vui Huang’s
SMS Front-end Menu for PayPal Mobile

To use PayPal Mobile via text message, a user will need to memorize a list of command codes and the sequence & format of how each payment detail should be arranged. Some services even have different SMS numbers to send the information to! Aside from the inconvenience, it is also easy to make mistakes - akin to a three-fingered alien making typos when writing out a check!

The solution is to have a user-friendly menu (or ‘wizards’ for the PC-inclined) to query and process the data, then format it into the pre-requsite order before sending it out to the PayPal Mobile server. This frees the user from having to memorize cryptic codes and reduces the occurance of human errors in manually composing the modern age equivalent of Telegraphic messages!

http://teavuihuang.com/paypalmobile

April 13th, 2006 at 9:18 am

Hey Saul, MC Visa AmEx Discover are too busy suing each other to care about the future of payments. Knock the dot com bubble all you want but the companies of that era are leaving their rivals in the dust!

May 28th, 2006 at 1:14 pm

Could not agree more with the comment about taking down their website for this. I am on my berry *only* this weekend and can not send payments for ebay auctions that I have won on ebay. This is a step back. /Josh

May 31st, 2006 at 8:14 am

HTTP://WWW.NO-PAYPAL.COM

October 14th, 2006 at 3:24 am

i would like to purchase a sony erricson p990i with via credit card any seller contact me by my mail

December 2nd, 2006 at 9:42 am

Obopay has launched a much better mobile payment service. Its free to sign up and they give you $5 free when you do. Check it out at http://www.obopay.com

February 3rd, 2007 at 7:01 am

The MOBI domain names will definately add to the internet! Maybe I’ll put my moving company estimates on a .mobi!