Etude de cas Paypal

The fundamental question is to establish who should take responsibility for the grave consequences that may arise from off-site operations, by Internet, when the credit card numbers provided to pay for such transactions were not entered by the true card holders. As in the words of the ruling against him: "when the purchase may have been made using a credit card, without the card holder having directly presented the card or having electronically identified it, the card holder may demand immediate cancellation of the purchase. The establishment must procure means to identify the receiver of the product". Yes, but how can that be done in a virtual shop?

According to the same study, volume of sales grew 17%, with respect to the previous year, as so did the number of internaut buyers, who in the same period grew by 360,000, arriving to a figure of 4,326,000 individuals (12% of the population of 15 years and older). Spain has turned into one of the countries where eBay has grown the most, due to the growth of e-commerce which already makes 4 million Spaniards (11.2% of the population) who shop online.

And internaut mistrust is abundant. The two computer security problems of the greatest cited incidence are, firstly, unsolicited and unwanted e-mails (known as spam), and secondly, computer viruses whose incidence among the internaut population has, however, been reduced from 57% to 42% respectively in 2005. Equally, the reception of illegal or offensive messages or files has also been reduced to 14% of internauts in this last period.

With this reality in mind, in 1998, Peter Theil and a group of friends from Stanford University created the company Confinity, with the aim of developing software that would allow people to transfer money in a secure and reliable way. From the beginning, Confinity and its first product, PayPal.com, attracted the interest of many important investors such as, Nokia Ventures, Deutsche Bank, Sachs & Co. PayPal made it easier for any person or company with an e-mail address to send and receive payments online quickly and securely. That small office, originally on a floor above a bakery in Palo Alto, California, brought the PayPal service to the public in October 1999.The service is made up of an infrastructure of banks and credit cards and uses its own advanced systems of fraud prevention, a global and safe real-time solution to making payments online.

Although the first developments were focussed on designing a function that would allow users to "electronically send" money through portable devices such as PalmPilots, it was evident, almost from the beginning, that being able to send money in this instantaneous way would be significantly more attractive to the public at large. Internauts, especially eBay users and small communities were immediately taken with the advantages of PayPal, which would permit payments to pass between private individuals without the inconveniences and cost as when via the banking system.

One of its latest acquisitions, in October 2005, was the electronic payment unit Verisign -one of PayPal's main competitors which it purchased for some $370 million. Jeff Jordan, PayPal's president, commented at the moment of the purchase, "it perfectly complements PayPal's payment service...this acquisition allows PayPal to give its clients even more possibilities in payment services". As a result of the operation, PayPal's management calculate that the company will generate an additional $100 million in earnings in 2006. News of the agreement was no more than out when Verisign rose 5 % in the Stock Exchange and eBay 1.4%.