Leading mobile operators are further personalizing the mobile customer experience in order to improv

Ben Elowitz (@elowitz) is co-founder and CEO of Wetpaint , a platform for social web sites, and author of the Digital Quarters blog. Prior to Wetpaint, Elowitz co-founded Blue Nile , the online retailer of luxury goods. He is also an angel investor in various media and e-commerce companies.
Earlier this month, John Donahoe, CEO of eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) and its subsidiary Paypal, was interviewed at the D8 conference. It was a flashback to see him speak: I had worked under him 15 years ago when I was a freshly minted undergrad just hired into the San Francisco office he ran for Bain & Company. A strapping and charismatic up-and-comer, John was known for his bold visionary talks and his strident walk.
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This is not a cost-effective solution because you missed the per-transaction merchant cost the content producer will incur with PayPal. The solution in the current economy is pre-paid, not post-paid and media firms will have to incorporate a pre-paid model to create their own digital economy to sell media goods.
Paypal still charge surveillance systems a fee and if you charge .99 cent for something, surveillance systems I believe they take .40 leaving you with .59 cents! I remember surveillance systems Paypal has a micro-payment option that charge a lower fee. But even still, Paypal is taking a cut of the per-transaction cost.
With the prepaid model and this is what I have adopted – the customer deposit $20.00 using Paypal and we give them 2000 credits. Now if they want to download media or content, it can cost 100 credits and we are not dealing with any per-transaction cost from the merchant account like a Paypal. This is also an international solution as we can also take currency deposit from any country surveillance systems and even sell PVC cards with scratch-off codes similar to what we see with online gaming/pre-paid phone cards at Target and Wal-Mart.
Once we move the customer into a credit system, we can keep them in-house and do the “impulse click” transactions you speak of and deduct credits accordingly. This is also a better workaround to that Amazon 1-click patent.
BTW, this prepaid model is excellent way to self-fund our web technology startups real fast without VCs who tend to ignore people like us. Instead of dealing with debt financing which is all the VC want to offer us, we can collect interest from the deposits instead of pay interest on debt financing.
I absolutely agree. Impulse buying of low cost items (like music tracks) is a lost opportunity that could be captured by a company with reach like PayPal. They have already started down that road with their recent foray into micro-payments. $0.05 +5% is a lot better for a $0.99 track than the old $0.25 +x%!
The problem with Paypal is that they’re surveillance systems not a bank and they’re not really a financial institution. Which means that if you’re ever unluncky enough to have a problem with them, it’s like negotiating with a drunken DMV employee. If a visitor surveillance systems to a media website has a problem with Paypal, the customer will blame to media website, not the backend solution. And trust me, there will be problems.
PhilipCohen Wednesday, surveillance systems June 23, 2010
It is with very great sadness that eBay s Chief Headless Turkey, John Donahoe (aka Peter Principle among many other derogatory terms), announces surveillance systems the probable demise of eBay s most ugly daughter, PayPal. PayPal is about to be stricken surveillance systems by particularly virulent strains of Visa+CyberSource and Mastercard open platform, aggravated by an insurmountable surveillance systems lack of direct financial institutions participation and a great deal of PayPal user/merchant dissatisfaction, particularly with respect to PayPal s grossly unfair, all responsibility avoiding UA, primitive risk management processes, and totally unprofessional, buyer-biased, fraud-facilitating, transactions mediation.
PayPal s health may therefore be expected to deteriorate and, if ultimately not completely incapacitated, will most likely be eventually confined to its mandatory offering on what little there will be by then left of the Donahoe-devastated eBay marketplaces. There is no cure for this condition, and the eBafia Don is particularly saddened by the inevitable presumption that it is unlikely that PayPal will be able to continue to underpin eBay s sagging bottom line in the future.
While prepaid accounts may work for certain publishers who have a very high relationship factor (e.g. Facebook), most publishers will get way too low of a take rate if they require an entire accou