Sunday, October 24, 2004

Slashdot | Yahoo Shuts Down Their PayPal Competitor

Slashdot | Yahoo Shuts Down Their PayPal Competitor: LostCluster writes "MSNBC and ZDnet are both reporting that Yahoo and HSBC have announced a shutdown plan for their PayDirect service which was their rival to PayPal. Since CitiBank abandoned their c2it service last year, PayPal now seems to be a monopoly by default." There are other players in this field, though, like bidpay and worldpay."

-- I can't say this surprises me at all - I use Yahoo! mail (primarily as my spam-able address that I put in web forms), and every time I go to their site and see the Yahoo PayDirect link, I always wonder how it makes any money, as I've never known a single person who has used it. PayPal has just always been the standard, particularly if you use eBay. Now that the two are one in the same, it's probably even harder to use any other payment service through eBay.

I would say that this news is disturbing, but honestly I've always been happy with PayPal (even post-eBay-acquisition), so it really doesn't bother me. In general though I'm a big fan of competition, so the exodus of competitors from the online payment services market can't be a good thing.

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