Visa Launches PayPal Alternative

An anonymous reader writes "Visa has entered the micropayment processing space with payclick, a pre-paid hosted service that will compete with the likes of PayPal. Payclick is aimed at teenagers purchasing online content like music and games where the value of the transaction is likely to be less than $20. Like PayPal, payclick is an online money repository that people can pay into with a bank account or credit card (Visa or MasterCard) and then use the funds to purchase products online. The service was developed and launched in Australia with a view for global markets. PayPal integration is not there yet, but parents can monitor the amount of funds their under-18 children have to spend online. For e-commerce sites, an SDK is available for payclick integration."

Careful not to load it up too much

[jaymz2k4]

Seems once your money is in the system its there for good

The amount of money held in a payclick account must be between $20 to $1000 and withdrawals to a bank account are not allowed. Payclick also supports recurring transactions

Of course you can just keep spending it online but I'm sure there'll come a point where little Jimmy wants some cold cash in his hands.

Re:Bloat

[acer8930]

You mean those radio option boxes are too hard for you?

Alternative?

[Aladrin]

For something that's supposed to compete with PayPal, it's amazingly limited.

You can't withdraw your own funds.
You can't transfer funds to anyone who isn't a family member unless they are a business, and Payclick gets a cut of the transfer to a business. (Note that I'm not faulting them for making money here, just stating facts.)
You can't pull right from a bank or credit card. You must pre-deposit funds.

Combine that with the fact that almost no services use it yet and it's not a very good offering.

Competition

[Wowsers]

How will Visa compete with shady business practices; keeping money from users, putting a stop on user accounts because there's a solar flare, not giving a damn about client data confidentiality, not being regulated as a bank. These things make it a tough act to follow for Visa.

Re:Careful not to load it up too much

[Lumpy]

Yup it's a scam. and it blows my nind they call a "micropayment" amounts under $20.00US...

I know that bankers wipe their asses with $50's and $100's but most Americans don't call even $5.00 a "micro" payment. Most people consider under $2.00 a micropayment.

Re:Competition

[chill]

You honestly ask this? Of a CREDIT CARD COMPANY!? PayPal is a piker compared to Visa.

Re:Careful not to load it up too much

[Twinbee]

Er excuse me, but I thought micropayments were something like $0.05 or less?

Re:Yes! yes! yes!

[1s44c]

In your face Paypal! May I never have to to use your rip off service again.

Paypal have been getting away with very dodgy behavior for some time now. They richly deserve the reputation they have earned as scammers out for a fast buck.

However that doesn't mean this new alternative is any better.

Re:Competition

[1s44c]

You honestly ask this? Of a CREDIT CARD COMPANY!? PayPal is a piker compared to Visa.

Visa are honest and trustworthy compared to paypal..

Re:Analogy Time Again

[1s44c]

"Lobiusmoop has entered the micropayment processing space with 'shiny pebbles', a payment scheme based on the exchange of pretty trinkets picked up from the finest beaches of the planet.

All money is just 'shiny pebbles'. It has no value except in the fact that other people value it.

Better Visa's shiny pebbles than paypal's. Better a central bank than either of them.

Re:Bloat

[FuckingNickName]

Stop using your credit card as a credit line, and start using it as a way to get up to 56 days extra interest on your money plus (often statutory) protections on purchases.

Re:Competition

[xtracto]

What, the people that spent more than they can afford?

IMHO Visa is just the international payment service or "an American global payments technology company" (as defined by Wikipedia).

That your particular bank is screwing people giving them loans they know cannot be paid back is a different thing.

Anyhow, I stopped using Paypal some time ago... not because I was scammed or because I wasn't happy but because PayPal is broken.

I moved from the UK to Germany and the idiots want me to close and open again my account, and the hassle I have to endure to do that is more than I have time to endure. Shit, they ask me to call PayPal... where? in Germany or in the UK? an the last time I called PayPal in Germany I was answered by an Indú sounding girl who didn't have a clue of what she was doing and I could not understand shit of what she was saying.

So, I would gladly accept a real paypal alternative, specially so that I provide my credit card ONCE to this "trusted source" and then just give my money (through them) to other companies... So far, Google Checkout has been the only plausible option.

Re:THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM !!

[mitgib]

How long before eBay marks it as a non-trusted form of payment?

Re:Careful not to load it up too much

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The only reason that $2-$5 is called a "micropayment" is that nobody ever figured out how to deliver on the original target(fractions of a penny up to a dollar or so) in any way that wasn't swamped by transaction costs or some other failure mechanism.

Some years ago, there was a lot of quasi-utopian fluff about them floating around. Then all the companies in the field went out of business.

Re:Alternative?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given how often accounts get frozen "for security reasons" without any form of useful recourse, I'd say that Paypal encourages you to take cash out of your account as fast as possible...

Re:THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM !!

[jbssm]

Exactly. I wonder how Google checkout is still a non trusted form of Payment for an eBay auction. Are they afraid Google steals our 10$ ?

Re:Analogy Time Again

[Wildclaw]

All money is just 'shiny pebbles'. It has no value except in the fact that other people value it.

Not really true. The value of a currency lies in both the willingness and requirement to make use of it.

That is why you aren't allowed to declare your incoming in ounces of gold, and why dollars are legal tender for all debt. To force you to use the currency for some things, giving it a direct value that isn't purely based on faith in the market.

Re:THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM !!

[Anonymous Coward]

At some threshold, they'll get in trouble over this- it's called a conflict of interest on their part. They own the only largely "trusted" payment company.

Visa might be the one to actually nail them over it.

Re:THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM !!

[VGPowerlord]

How long before eBay marks it as a non-trusted form of payment?

How long after that would Visa start declining charges made through PayPal?

Unlike Google, Visa can cause problems for eBay.

Re:Competition

[VGPowerlord]

Paypal has never frozen my account for "suspicious activity" (three purchases from one company, each purchase froze it), frozen my account without notifying me for two weeks, well after I'd figured it out on my own when I couldn't make a purchase and had already resolved it, or frozen my wife's account when mine was the one that got compromised despite their assurances hers would be fine.

I've never had my PayPal account frozen either.

Having said that, Visa and PayPal both freeze accounts for suspicious activity... however PayPal doesn't just freeze one account, but every account that account has interacted with recently.

I can only recall Visa having frozen my account once; that wasn't really an account freeze either, it was just a block of a single merchant for a short time. Why? Because I was ordering the same item repeatedly to gift to friends on Steam. This was back when Orange Box was $10 (or was that $5?). They started blocking the transactions after the third for suspicious activity.

That's great. That's what Visa is supposed to do. My only problem is that they wouldn't unblock it even after I called them.

Oh well, I convinced several of my friends that I didn't gift Orange Box to to buy it on their own anyway.

(P.S. This is more of a failing of the Steam store. You can't gift single items, only an entire transaction.)

Re:Anything is better than Paypal...

[fermion]

Here is one thing I like about paypal. I have my account set up to use a one time pad. This in itself is a layer of security. I do not have it linked to my bank account, i only have it linked to my credit card.

I think one issue that people have with paypal is that they expect it to be a credit card. It is not, it is just an way to exchange cash without metting. It really has no level of security beyond that. If one gets the product or not, that is another matter. I like not having to provide credit card credentials to arbitrary people and firms on the internet. Paypal is expensive to use, but I find it to be generally effective.

What I do not like is Verified by Visa. It only wants a weak password and if someone gets the password then they can take all your money. The security check to create a Verified by Visa account is also meaningless, requesting little more information than is required to complete a transaction in the normal way. Verified by Visa is security theatre.

Re:Oh, so right

[jvkjvk]

The difference in treatment is jarring. I don't think I'll ever become fully accustomed to it.

There is a school of thought that you shouldn't. That you should continue to remind yourself of how you were treated when you were a "nobody".

This school seems to believe that one way to avoid becoming the opressor (when working inside the system) is to remember when you were opressed. So that if you ever do have Hierarchical Authority over others you do not use the corresponding Power in ways you would have disagreed with.

They seem to believe the issue with "becoming accustomed" to such a dichotomy is that one loses track of where the bright line is between the Authority to do something and the Power to do it.

Of course, what do *they* know? I'm sure that eventually "might makes right" will be proven correct.

Regards.