posted on September 13, 2000 09:50:56 PM new
I decided to run over to your website to check if anything had changed since all hell broke loose. The opening page greets me with:
Sign up for your FREE Personal Account!
I decided to see how you now are defining Personal. Click away. I now see a form to quickly sign up for a PayPal personal account. In the upper right corner is a link which says... Personal or Business Account? Click again...
There's your familiar chart of recent, comparing Personal and Premiere/Business Accounts. The core personal features are:
Send money
Request money
Auction tools
Account insured up to $100,000
$5 sign up and referral bonuses
Email-based customer service
The Premiere/Business now includes: Web Accept, Instant Purchase, Auto Sweep, etc.
You know what? I don't want any of those so I'm still in the personal category. But wait, Auction Tools is in the Personal Account list. To accept payment for an auction aren't I selling? Why is that in the category and FREE? Hmmm If you sell something more that one time your company now says I'm a business.
Then at the bottom is:
Rules
In order to reserve Personal Accounts for individual use only, we require all businesses to sign up for a Business Account. Individuals may sign up for either a Personal or Premier Account.
Then I read the new and improved Terms of Service. There is the statement: If you use the Service for the purpose of conducting e-commerce on a regular basis, you agree to register for, or upgrade to, a Premier or Business Account.
What is e-commerce we ask? The InvestorWords web site defines it as:
electronic commerce
The buying and selling of products and services by businesses and consumers over the internet. Such a practice has exploded in the past year alone, as security issues have improved, and more and more consumers are buying and goods and services onlinealso called ecommerce. Typically there are three types of ecommerce transactions: business to business (Cisco), business to consumer (ie etailers), and consumer to consumer (eBay).also called ecommerce.
Hmmm... I guess you just covered your butt and dragged everyone into the business category since consumer to consumer transactions are even in the e-commerce definition. By the way, what is your definition of selling on a regular basis... monthly, weekly, hourly?
So, what happened to that FREE personal account? What happened to your original statements that the service would always be free?
[ edited by avaloncourt on Sep 13, 2000 09:53 PM ]
