EBay Acquiring VeriSign Processing for $370 Million

Forum124 was one of the first in a wave of readers to tell us that eBay is acquiring VeriSign's payment processing business for US$370 million. VeriSign will be merged with PayPal and is estimated to generate a 20 percent operating margin which eBay hopes to help offset the recently reported high purchase price of Skype.

does this mean

[Adult film producer]

that micropayments are just around the corner ? Somehow ? Maybe I'm just thinking wishfully here .. :(

Boost to Paypal?

[onion2k]

Legg Mason analyst Scott Devitt said the deal promises to give PayPal a leg-up in becoming the accepted payment mechanism system on VeriSign's 100,000 or so small business sites.

My experience tells me otherwise. I've been developing small business ecommerce sites for the past 10 years, and on every single development I've been part of we've tried to avoid Paypal integration simply because it puts users off. As I'm based in the UK I've had very little experience of Verisign's payment gateway, but if users have a worse perception of it than they do of Paypal's then I'd be really suprised.

Uhhhh...

[xiphoris]

They don't have the money to buy us :o) In your dreams...

Googlezon, on the other hand... that could be sweet.

-- Justin Crites, Amazon.com Software Development Engineer

Verisign is teh suck

[Aqua OS X]

If someone is already habitually doing business with VeriSign, they're accustom to abysmal service, so I doubt this merger will force them to abandon ship.

In my professional geek career, I have yet to met a business that could top VeriSign's ability to cause grief, stress, development delays, and outrageous legal fees.

VeriSign is responsible for the collapse of the last company I worked for. We spent 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars designing and developing a retail solution based around a particular domain name. Unfortunately, the CEO fell victim of identity theft before we launched and some a-hole was able to acquire our domain names though ****ing VeriSign.

You'd think we'd be able to get them back easily. We had receipts and we didn't authorize the transfer. But, nooo. They wouldn't cooperate with our lawyers or the California Computer Crimes Task Force. It was SUCH a pain.

And I know I'm not alone on this one. VeriSign is the biggest POS.
I have several, less destructive, examples of being screwed by that company. But I'll spare you for now.

Hopefully, Ebay will make VeriSign slightly less crappy.

Can't buy credibility

[shanen]

This advertising-related post [slashdot.org] has already drained my insight resevoir for the day, so for now I'll just note that there is a relationship, though it is from a slightly different angle, where the (usually artificial) credibility is the key. However, I predict that eBay will not be able to buy credibility, though that's the main "product" of VeriSign. You can't "stabilize" a situation that intrinsically has negative dynamic stability. Having given that big hint, I'm not willing to offer a prize for the first person to see the rest of the problem...

Since I'm evidently too tired to focus properly on the topic, I'll go ahead and add another CSS-related comment, since this seems to be a new symptom afflicting the abandoned-by-/. users of Opera. Now most of the left side links are dead, especially at the top. The overwriting problems aren't as bad as before, so it seems like they're tinkering with it.

Interesting side point

[TheSpoom]

When I was working at Stream [stream.com] (a tech support outsourcer), in the beginning about three years ago, we had a Verisign call center. That always struck me as kind of odd, because it was the only contract that had to be cut off from the rest of the building, i.e., the others had windows to the "main hall" whereas the Verisign portion you could never quite see what they were doing. I mean, I can understand (kind of...) outsourcing first and perhaps second level customer service for the desktop division of someone like HP (the contract I was on) but outsourcing the primary customer contact for a security company?

They went internal some time afterward from what I heard but I often wonder if we actually just lost the contract to a lower bidder.

VeriSign as a Credit Card Processor

[RebrandSoftware]

I own a small business and recently switched to VeriSign as my credit card processor.

I've actually had a great experience with them so far. They have excellent filters for blocking fraudulent orders (before switching, almost 10% of our orders were fraudulent), and the customer service has been excellent.

The payment services are basically a middle-man to your merchant bank. The customer is sent to VeriSign, they enter their payment information, VeriSign verifies the address, zip code, and CSC (three numbers on the back of the card). If all is well, they send the transaction through to your merchant bank. Your merchant bank then deposits the funds directly into your personal or business account.

Along the way they each take a small chunk of the transaction, and you also have to pay monthly fees to both VeriSign and to your merchant bank.

Taking credit cards in addition to PayPal definitely increased our sales. I can see why they want to merge this with PayPal, making it a much more versatile payment processing solution.