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Failures

by Mike Masnick

Tue, Sep 30th 2003 3:29pm





Citigroup Kills PayPal Wannabe

from the taking-down-the-big-boys dept

About three years ago, when PayPal first really became "big", suddenly everyone started trying to offer a PayPal type service. eBay created their own, which went nowhere until they just bought PayPal. Yahoo had troubles with their version, and eventually partnered with a bank to provide a similar offering. The one that seemed to get the most press, though, was Citigroup's c2it. People all over were predicting that it would kill PayPal. After all, who would you trust with your money? Some little startup in Silicon Valley or Citibank? It appears the people went with the Silicon Valley startup as Citigroup has announced they're shutting down c2it. It seems that they were betting that people would use person-to-person payments for just about everything, and the reality is that it's mostly just used for auctions - where PayPal has the market sewn up.

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  1.  
    identicon
    AMetamorphosis, Oct 1st, 2003 @ 8:13am

    Good riddance

    I had the displeasure of trying to work with " shitty bank " to set up a c2it account ... lets just skip to the chase and say that I for one am VERY happy to see this pathetic wanna-be service stop.
    It sucked.
    They lied.
    And Customer service was non-existent.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  
    identicon
    Oliver Wendell Jones, Oct 1st, 2003 @ 8:30am

    I used them once

    They had a PayPal (early, early PayPal that is) type deal where you got $5 in your C2it account just for signing up. I was buying some flashlights off of ebay and the vendor accepted C2it and recommended it (because I think he got $5 for each new sign up IIRC) and so by using C2it I got $5 off of my $16 order and (I think) the vendor got an extra $5.

    Then I never used them again as PayPal was just more convenient.

    For that one usage I had no complaints.

     

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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