In many "developed countries" we pay taxes that support a system of electronic fund transfer between banks and the treasury or banking department. Here in the USA that is called the Federal Reserve Banking system, which provides check clearing and EFT transactions across the world.

Our banks charge us $2.00 transaction fees to use atm's and our taxes help support them further. Ever try to pay by electronic check by phone, only to hear the bastards will charge you $9.00 to make your car payment that way?

The whole lot of them are a bunch of bleeding buggering thieves!

It is high time we regular folk were given the same rights as the banking industry and that all businesses were required to use the SAME FRIGGIN SYSTEM for electronic payments.

NO "PayPal" or somesuch ridiculous crap, just a regular credit card and 6 to 8 charachter ALPHANUMERIC "PIN" number. No friggin proprietary bulltwinkie "one click" with my "account" info strewn all over multiple companies servers, just VISA or Mastercard or some other normal credit card transaction. The only difference is I run it from my own home.

Every time I want to buy something, I will enter my card number & PIN and I don't want it stored on the server of the company I am buying from, destined to be scammed by some phishing eastern european cracker. It should ONLY be seen by the credit card issuer and the entire transaction should take place on THEIR server with a confirmation and identity code sent to the sellers server and to myself.

This network is ALREADY IN PLACE! All "they" have to do is let US use it and it is ours to begin with.

Individuals should be given access to it, because we paid for it's creation and it is the only secure way to give EVERYONE a cash free, uniform method of payment.

By the way, the posting of this comment constitutes "prior art" and is entirely my idea. I want just 0.005 cents per transaction for my efforts.

Our company switched over to Google Checkout two weeks ago after PayPal decided that we were no longer worthy of their services after using them for many years (they stated a single thumbnail image AUP violation and terminated our account). Yep, just shut it down. No warning, nothing. They stated in a form letter that there was no action we could take to restore the account. Man, the boss was fuming as we used PayPal to pay royalties to book authors and buying of material and equipment. Financially it almost wrecked us.

We arn't the only ones. Take a look at some of the sites like this one that list hundreds of horror stories about PayPal:

http://www.paypalwarning.com/

PayPal does not worry about alienating their customers. They have such a lock on eBay that they have a host of eager people waiting to sign up just to buy that great antique Pet Rock in mint condition.

I for one welcome new competition on the block, and I for one welcome Amazon's financial services.

A new service with a realistic AUP and TOS would be a welcome change.

PayPal is indeed horrible. If some worthy competitors enter the market, things can only get better. As an ebay seller you almost have to be nuts to use PayPal.

I'm a big fan of Paypal, as a buyer and a seller. It's very convenient.

However, their customer service and dispute resolution is awful. They have the arrogance of a bank and none of the legal accountability.

It's great to see some real competition - I moved my sites over to Google Checkout recently and I've been recommending it to all my clients due to the total lack of fees. Will be interesting to see what their fee schedule will be when they start charging - hopefully this additional competitor will keep costs down across the board.

Hopefully FPS will take off, too many of Amazon's ideas have never really gone anywhere despite being potentially revolutionary (Mechanical Turk, anyone?).

About time, I am fed up seeing traders you will only accept payment via PayPal (cretins), I am happy with Amazon, but will never ever pay by PayPal *, I doubt that I am alone on this.

* I took three damned months to get a lot of money back from some useless US traders, lucky I paid PayPal by a decent credit card, so I could do a charge-back, never again!

Hear me honest traders, dump PayPal or you cripple your trade and risk getting screwed by PayPal too!

We see Google Auctions?

I'm sure it'd clean up... people seem to trust Google more than Paypal/Ebay. Even the word Ebay is synonymous with "ripped off" more than "bargain" these days.

a payment service isn't suitable unless it has a "substantial historical track record of providing safe and reliable financial and/or banking related services."

HAHAHA

so thats why I got a chargeback for £1090 and then sorry due to data protection act we cant tell you why!! thanks paypal, your no pal of mine!

I welcome any online payments that are better than paypal, whats stopping banks from issuing USB chip and pin devices for a small charge?

You only have to read paypal sucks.com