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PayPal is not subject to regular banking regulations. Because it considers itself to be an 'electronic money transmitter', user rights and safeguards vary.
PayPal was founded in December 1998 by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of its first premises was the 165 University Avenue office in Palo Alto, California, home of a number of other noted Silicon Valley startups. On the business side, many of its initial recruits were alumni of The Stanford Review, which was also founded by Peter Thiel. Most of the early engineers hailed from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recruited by Max Levchin. In its initial incarnation, PayPal was a service for users to send money via PDAs, with actor James Doohan, Star Trek's "Scotty," as its spokesman. The PDA software was later discarded in favor of a web-based system that became popular with eBay's millions of buyers and sellers. Coupled with aggressive marketing campaigns offering $10 (and later $5) for new users to sign up, the firm grew at a meteoric rate of 7–10 percent per day between January and March 2000.
eBay generates revenue from a number of fees. There are fees to list a product and fees when the product sells. The eBay fee system is quite complex and takes $0.20 to $80 per listing and 3-5% of the final price. In addition, eBay now owns the PayPal payment system which has fees of its own.
A screenshot of eBay's front page.
