eBay Rethinking Skype Purposes Again: No More Sending Money via PayPal
by
on February 23, 2009,
These days every now and then we see companies rethinking their business politics and overall business directions in order to keep healthy operations amidst the financial turmoil and try and survive the recession. The most recent example is Skype cancelling the possibility to send money via Skype using PayPal.
This functionality was introduced almost 2 years ago and in a blog post on the official Skype blog earlier today the team has announced that the feature will no longer exist and provided a very simple and straightforward explanation: the feature was never really used a lot - or at least enough to continue to support it.
The feature worked pretty simple: for any user in your Skype contacts you could choose to send a file or send this user money. For obvious reasons the money was supposed to be sent via PayPal as both services are owned by eBay. The feature still looks to be functional in my current installation of Skype and lets me proceed to the step of logging in to PayPal so I believe it is still working and supported by Skype and will only be disabled in the future (probably in the next software update).
It is quite understandable that the feature is disabled now as it never really made enough sense. First of all, the functionality of payments is usually introduced as a form of monetization for companies where they charge a fee for helping the transaction happen. In case of sending money via PayPal using Skype as your entrance point it did not really make sense: everything they did was sending you to PayPal to make the payment - and opened a web browser to log in into the electronics payment provider. And Skype looked merely like an additional distribution channel for PayPal - that did not even make anything off the transactions that were initiated on Skype.
In fact, there was not even enough evidence of the fact that any particular payment was initiated on Skype as the Skype handle of a user was not even added to PayPal payment notification - which made this functionality useless even for transactions that required Skype handles in the process - like paying for third-party services available as Skype add-ons.
What’s more, there have always been things that made me question the integration between Skype and PayPal - like the fact that once you use a certain PayPal account to pay for Skype credits you will never be able to use another account to do the same - even if the first one you no longer use. So this lack of coordination has always made me wonder how it happens that the two services operating under one roof can’t agree on such simple things.
Of course it is totally understandable that Skype should focus on things they actually know how to do: free computer to computer voice and video calls, instant messaging and cheap VoIP calls to regular phones from desktop or mobile applications. But it’s not really good to watch eBay still looking to be unable to decide exactly how they are going to use all the excellent services acquired by the internet auctions giant - and make them work flawlessly together. Of course the services like Skype or PayPal are useful to a huge community of internet users but given the fact that they are owned by one company it is logical to expect that company would try to build some synergy and integrate them to work together. Too bad eBay still has not figured out how to do that.
