Yesterday I had a post about Why You Should Never Trust PayPal With Crypto, in which I shared my point of view about this payment processor offering their services. Turns out I'm not the only one thinking what they do is neither safe, nor right.
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If you look at the stock market, PayPal stock are doing remarkably well, thank you very much! The 5 year chart shows a significant increase last year and according to some experts, investing in the company is a good idea.
As a result of the company's fundamental strength, PayPal's EPS Rating is a highest-possible 99. The EPS Rating measures a company's ability to grow profits year over year, using the most recent two quarters and the past three to five years of earnings growth.
The SMR Rating, meanwhile, highlights a company's sales, profit margins and return on equity. Such metrics offer significant insight into a company's fundamental strength. Driven by PayPal's double-digit sales growth in recent quarters, 26% annual pretax margin and 23% annual ROE in 2019, the SMR Rating is an A. source
If you look at the chart above, the jump of the stock price started in March 1 last year, which coincides with the start of lockdowns worldwide. Make no mistake, it's not a coincidence. The pandemic has speeded up the evolution of digital payments, some say we bypassed 8 years of growth in one year and it's impacting the whole world.
The more we advance in time, online payments will take over. That's the trend, no one can stop this. Staying home and ordering online is what we're going to do in the future as it saves us time.
PayPal earnings climbed 29% to $1.08 an adjusted share, the company said. PayPal revenue rose 23% to $6.12 billion, including the acquisition of Honey Science.
The company said it added 16 million net new active accounts worldwide in the December quarter. Well known for its online checkout button, PayPal had 377 million active accounts as of Dec. 31. source
For those of you who are not familiar with who PayPal is, it's a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. It makes sense for one of the biggest E-commerce platform to have its own payment processor and offer buyers full protection.
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When shopping online, the most important for any buyer is security. No one whats to be conned out. When you see an offer like that, you feel secure and that's where PayPal's success lies.
(Look at no. 3. Pay more securely with just an email address and a password. I'd say a little bit of work is needed on that front as nowadays an email address and a password is not enough.)
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As I said, I'm the luckiest person as I've always gotten my money back if the product hasn't arrived, that's why I feel safe with PayPal as a buyer, but here's the story of @orestistrips, who has not been so lucky when he sold his camera. No camera, no money and no justice, this could be the title of his story.
PayPal also has a seller protection, which I suspect it's not working properly, flavoring mostly buyers. Chinese sellers have the habit of sending several emails before you even get the product, ensuring you whatever issue you have either with the product or the shipping, contact them first before you turn to PayPal as everything can be worked out. This is made out of fear. When your livelihood is at stake, you do everything you can as once your PayPal account suspended, you can't get another and this pay be the only international payment option for you.
No wonder German and Austrian sellers are not accepting PayPal as payment option. They only operate via bank transfer and there's no chance of changing their mind even if you ask nicely.
I don't have any experience with Amazon as whenever I tried to buy something, I had to find out the seller is not shipping to my country, but I bet many of you know Amazon very well and can share your stories.
Unfortunately over the years, quite a few platforms grew to enormous proportions and now dominate the world, literally. PayPal, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google are just a few and each one is abusing users in its own way. I don't think I need to list the things they have done.
This must come to an end. We need decentralization worldwide.
I think blockchain technology, crypto and defi can help a lot. Many smaller companies are adopting the distributed ledger technology to show customers transparency, to offer the possibility to follow the process from harvest to the final product. It's a start, I know the road is bumpy but truly hope we can make some progress every year in each area, till we reach our goal.
I'm expecting a market on HIVE! It's time to have our own market, where we can use our tokens to buy and sell whatever we please. A free market would definitely help onboarding new users as well as small businesses. It's time for someone to develop and launch a market.
