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by iopq 814 days ago
Unless your first mover advantage lets you just stay there for decades. See: PayPal

they have only now been dethroned as the default credit card processor despite being awful to work with when I tried to integrate their API circa 2010
1 comments
toast0 814 days ago
If first mover advantage in internet payment processing was important, CyberCash would still be around. I'm pretty sure there was another internet payment processor around before PayPal too.

Setup was harder, and the integration wasn't the same, but it was before PCI, so integrating with CyberCash meant you could own the whole payment flow, and have a better experience than PayPal, where you send the user off, and when they come back, PayPal may not have confirmed payment yet.

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iopq 814 days ago
Yes, but PayPal was growing off the back of eBay, CyberCash never became entrenched to get the first mover's advantage

> The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on March 11, 2001. VeriSign acquired the Cybercash assets (except for ICVerify) and name a couple of months later. On November 21, 2005 PayPal (already an eBay company) acquired VeriSign's payment services, including Cybercash.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberCash

so in a way, PayPal ate a lot of the other payment processors

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