PayPal
PayPal Sends Money to the Philippines!
Oh my God. This is the gamechanger. Philippine PayPal users can now receive money.
Let that sink in for a second. Rural Filipinos can now sell their towns’ products directly to the world over eBay. Talented Filipina babes can become the next Happy Slip by posting their videos on Revver. The Philippines — indeed, individual Filipinos — can finally earn money in the global Long Tail of ecommerce.
My mind is now racing with the possibilities for my fellow Filipinos. For years, the government has talked big about globally empowering Filipinos through ecommerce. Guess what: the power is here.
Now the task is to show people how to use that power. Filipinos are so used to the oppression of the middleman that they’ll have to learn how to live with disintermediation.
I want to name so many more sites where Filipinos can make money through PayPal, but I can’t. I know they’re out there, in the thousands. I just haven’t kept track of them. We’ve lived without PayPal for so long, we’ve ignored all PayPal revenue sources. We all have to get used to the light after years in the darkness.
(Via John Cuneta.)
PayPal Robbed Me
This morning, I tried adding a new MasterCard debit card to my PayPal account. PayPal rejected the card — ten times. Unbeknownst to me, and as my bank would inform me later this morning, PayPal charged that same card PhP 45.16 each time. I lost PhP 451.60 (roughly $10) to PayPal even though their site repeatedly “rejected” my new debit card. If they rejected it, why did they keep successfully charging it?
PayPal’s longtime monopoly on online payment has made them both arrogant and complacent. I am only too happy to watch their monopoly fall in the face of big new competitors like Google Checkout and Amazon FPS.
I’ve pulled all my credit cards out of my PayPal account. I am never doing business with PayPal again.
Update, August 14, 9:32 AM GMT+8: PayPal just emailed. They promise to remove the charges in a few days. Let’s wait and see if they make good on that promise.
