There's a big gap between the PayPal (PYPL) story/investor slide deck and market reality. As an investor we like it – hits all the right notes and management has all the right answers. But as a user we scratch our head and wonder where all the innovation is. (PayPal was very innovative in the early days. They were founded in 1998. That's eons in the software world.)
The CEO, Dan Schulman, said in his presentation on Sept 17th at the DB conference that they were on old difficult-to-change software but now after major investments they are on a more modern easy-to-adapt platform. Could he be talking about Braintree/Venmo which they recently acquired? If so it's apples and oranges. Venmo is the basis of the PayPal “OneTouch” offering aimed at mobile and for in-app purchasing. This isn't the core platform today.
We like the acquisition of Braintree/Venmo but it begs the question of whether PayPal has any native ability to innovate and develop great software. If they have it we have not seen it. The real innovator in the software space is Stripe which has built a new platform from the ground up.
Using the existing PayPal platform next to Stripe feels like using a mainframe computer terminal next to an iphone. From a developer-perspective the difference is even more stark. Stripe has catered to and wowed developers from Day 1.PayPal has a history of being hostile and uncooperative with developers which continues to this day, in part because of their multiple legacy software platforms. They probably couldn't be developer friendly even if they wanted to.
Back to Mr. Schulman's presentation – he says all the right words about being a platform the developers can easily integrate to for all their e-commerce needs. But as a user I can tell you that the marketing doesn't match the product. It doesn't work, you can't do it and there is no easy support to help you make it work. We've worked with PayPal as a vendor for a decade before moving to Stripe this year in order to escape the periodic outages and ridiculous challenges to make the system do what it is supposed to do.
