Is There Any Other Place Like Paypal?

In a market where payment processors are growing quickly (Stripe, Braintree, Square, et al.), which has much to do with businesses growing frustrated with PayPal, why doesn't PayPal place a bigger emphasis on customer service?

• We've all heard PayPal horror stories before, but they still dominate online and peer to peer payments. Their poor service has lost a lot of long-term customers, the samples below are just the tip of the iceberg: A PayPal user discusses how his account was erroneously shut down: http://elliotjaystocks.com/blog/good-riddance-paypal/ "A combination of being unhappy with customer support and the disruption of our checkout process with redirects led to us searching for alternatives." - http://gc-taylor.com/blog/2011/12/8/why-we-ditched-paypal-stripe/ A PayPal user describes an exchange with customer support: http://christianowens.com/post/15771850658/my-recent-experience-with-paypal-customer-service They have the market share, and they have the resources - why not place a bigger emphasis on customer service?

• Answer:

  It's hard to teach old horse new tricks as they say. As with any company, the biggest flexibility and innovation in a company happens while the originators of the business (owners) are still actively engaged in the business, because then you have people who are both smart and can afford to make mistakes (it is their own money at the end). What happens when owners sell the business is that the new owners typically put in "MBA people" as I call them, which are generally not educated to make risks but to run a business on the pre-determined rails. They are also afraid of loosing their jobs and most of the things they will do are significantly constrained. Bill Gates said something to that effect when he said that he can afford to make mistakes. That is where the real stuff happens. So, PayPal, having been at the right time and at the right place, ended up being one of those boring big companies, while they could have realistically become something of a world bank, i.e. a company which processes payments and gives financial services worldwide on a much more larger scale than now. Just think of it, out of billions of people on the internet, they have only around 100-120M active users. They attempted to hire some new people, like the owner of Zong, but like my first sentence says, this is not much about the guy on top, but about having balls to make mistakes. And for this, you need to be a significant owner, otherwise some idiot shareholder will sue you for "making actions contrary to the interest of shareholders" or something like that, if you dare to try something new and fail.