The other consistently supported thing is card numbers. I generate virtual card numbers for every merchant, no need for some suspicious interloper. For non-recurring or one-off transactions -- new virtual card for each purchase.

Maybe we’re doing different things or in different regions, but I rarely see pay with PayPal now.

Luckily I haven't for years now. But might indeed be different regions.

I see it absolutely everywhere still. We all exist in our own bubbles.

Yes it's basically every website in Australia you can pay via PayPal now. I use it less and less since Apple Pay is available pretty much everywhere, but it can still be handy now and then.

Popular in South Africa also and remains one of the very few credit card processors where you can bill in USD and remit in ZAR (no Stripe in SA)

I see it all the time in Europe. Many German online shops have Paypal as the default payment method and may even process card payments through Paypal.

Also, it's often the way people transfer money between each other.

Still see it sometimes in the UK, but if it's there often there's an extra fee to use paypal instead of card, so I doubt many people use it.

Card number is standard, with an increasing amount of places supporting Apple Pay (thankfully)

Are you in Germany by chance?

Yep.

It is funny :-)

Moving to Germany from the US was like entering a timewarp. PayPal is still real??? People use it??

I get it now but it's a pretty big miss that GiroCard couldn't figure out how to displace them after all this time.

Sometimes it's the other way around. Lockers for packages were first introduced in Germany (Packstation) then they were rolled out in the US almost a decade later.

Not having a lot of credit cards and the associated rewards is actually healthy. Research has shown lower social classes "pay" for the rewards due to paying the higher transaction fees. There was actually a relevant thread here a few days ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49432201 (How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer)

:-)

Well, I used to live and work in South Korea for many years, so both DE and the US are about equally oldschool in my book :)

>What makes them dead? It's still the only consistently supported thing I encounter online.

online is dead too, no app uses paypal, and plenty of online merchants take credit cards more than paypal; they even offer their own credit cards.

paypal hasn't innovated at all in over a decade, and people are scared of the way it will hang on to your money with little recourse.

"No app uses PayPal"

You have already lost your plot with that claim. Just because you don't use it doesn't mean it is not widespread.

PayPal is, unfortunately, not dead. It's used by RMV in Germany for a start - only way to pay for a bus ticket in the app/website. No credit or debit card, straight up PayPal account.

> online is dead too, no app uses paypal

PayPal is the payment method I use for Google Pay, so pretty much everything goes through it.

(I don't have a credit card, which is common where I live.)

PayPal originally took off as it was convenient and fast, saving you from filling in card details each time and it also allowed sending payments for private transactions using only an email address

Since then Apple Pay/Google pay/browser wallets have taken a big chunk of its fast checkout advantage

And mobile banking apps/instant transfer have taken out chunks of the private transactions, and more so as consumer to consumer transactions often had the parties using PayPal gift mode to avoid fees but that then had zero protection.

The 2020’s is much more crowded than 1990’s and 2020’s decades

Also it was its partnership with eBay that made it dominant and eBay no longer promote PayPal as preferred payment method.

PayPal also allowed internet payments without requiring handing over credit card details to a third party. Handing your credit card number to every two-but e-commerce site pretty much guaranteed your card would be compromised. Today PCI requirements and tokenization reduce the risks substantially and Apple Pay and Google Pay add another layer of protection.

Apparently first mover advantage (with about a decade head start?) still counts for a lot. https://www.chargeflow.io/blog/paypal-statistics-facts#paypa...

That estimates PayPal still has 40%+ online payment market share.

I'm assuming a lot of that is long-tail 'I put a PayPal link on my store in 2005' stuff, but I imagine those add up.

And they're also probably a sticky customer base, in the sense that anyone still using PayPal as primary today doesn't like changing things, which makes acquiring those customers worth it.