eBay, Magento, AliExpress, Skype, PayPal, Google, Schmoogle, whatever  The rusting old hulk eBay is presently being kept afloat by PreyPal so it’s good to see these boys recently squabbling and threats to the clunky PreyPal now coming thick and fast. It’s interesting times for all we eBay “haters” (oops, I mean “watchers”). I just hope that someone has remembered to bring the popcorn.  PayPal is mostly registered in various places not as a “bank” but only as a “money transmitter” (like Western Union), and PayPal actually claims that they are not a “payment processor”, and there is a minute degree of truth in that claim because it could, nonsensically, be claimed that they do no more than facilitate the transmission of money by riding on the back of the banks’ existing payments processing systems.  In fact, the only thing creative about PayPal has been their use of users’ email addresses as an identifier for online transactions. PayPal is otherwise no more than a blood-sucking parasite on, and in the main cannot function except via, the banks’ existing payments system (via their banker, GE Money Bank—Ugh!).  PayPal, outside of whatever will ultimately be left of the Donahoe-devastated eBay Marketplace, will undoubtedly eventually be consigned to the history books by all the retail banks/Visa/Mastercard once those players get their “online” act together.  Some people may not like “the banks” but all those participating retail banks at least supply a professionally run payments processing system—unlike PayPal’s—and even PayPal concurs with that assessment: except for intra PayPal “account” transactions, they use the banks’ payments processing system all the time and simply could not exist without it.  Regardless, all the above comments apply equally to all of the other third-party “payments processors” that are emerging out of the woodwork and wanting to have access to your banking account. Unless they a formal arrangement with all the participating retail banks, as do the likes of Visa/MasterCard, then the result is invariably going to be as potentially problematic as presently is PayPal’s clunky operation for its merchants, and many of them can tell you a sorry tale or two.  All anyone needs to know about the clunky PayPal can be found at: http://forums.auctionbytes.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=165263  Is that PayPal’s blood in the water, and are those “sharks” (oops, “banks”) I can see circling?  Enron / eBay / PayPal / Donahoe: Dead Men Walking.
Ebay announced Monday that it has agreed to acquire Magento Inc., the company behind the open source ecommerce platform Magento.