On October 3, 2002, PayPal became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay. Its corporate headquarters are in San Jose, California, United States at eBay's North First Street satellite office campus. The company also has significant operations in Omaha, Scottsdale, Charlotte and Austin in the United States; Chennai in India; Dublin in Ireland; Kleinmachnow in Germany; and Tel Aviv in Israel. From July 2007, PayPal has operated across the European Union as a Luxembourg-based bank.
PayPal developed after Internet financial services company X.com acquired Confinity in March 2000. Confinity was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek, and Ken Howery and in 1999 launched a money transfer service called PayPal. The PayPal money-transfer system was only months old at the time X.com acquired Confinity but X.com founder Elon Musk felt it had a promising future. Musk and then president and CEO, Bill Harris, disagreed on this point and Harris left the company in May 2000. In October Musk made the decision that X.com would terminate its other Internet banking operations and focus on the PayPal money service. The X.com company was then renamed PayPal and expanded rapidly in 2001 primarily as a result of its use on eBay.
As of 2011, PayPal operates in 190 markets and manages more than 232 million accounts, more than 100 million of them active. PayPal allows customers to send, receive, and hold funds in 26 currencies worldwide. These currencies are the Australian dollar, Brazilian real, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi yuan (only available for some Chinese accounts, see below), euro, pound sterling, Japanese yen, Czech koruna, Danish krone, Hong Kong dollar, Hungarian forint, Israeli new sheqel, Malaysian ringgit, Mexican peso, New Zealand dollar, Norwegian krone, Philippine peso, Polish zloty, Singapore dollar, Swedish krona, Swiss franc, New Taiwan dollar, Thai baht, Turkish lira and US dollar. PayPal operates locally in 21 countries.
Residents in 194 markets[clarification needed] can use PayPal in their local markets to send money online.
PayPal revenues for Q1 2009 were $643 million, up 11 percent year over year. 42 percent of revenues in Q1 2009 were from international markets. PayPal's Total Payment Volume (TPV), the total value of transactions in Q1 2009 was nearly $16 billion, up 10 percent year over year.
In 2008, PayPal's Total Payment Volume (TPV) off eBay exceeded volume on eBay for the first time. PayPal's TPV in 2008 was $60 billion, representing nearly 9 percent of global e-commerce and 15 percent of US e-commerce.
At an analyst day on March 11, 2009, eBay CEO John Donahoe announced that PayPal could be a larger driver of revenue than the eBay marketplaces business. RIM (now BlackBerry) announced that PayPal will be the only payment mechanism for its BlackBerry App World (now BlackBerry World), which launched on April 1, 2009. However, by April 2011 RIM started offering two other options: credit card payment and mobile carrier billing (using the Bango Payment system).
PayPal launched Student Accounts for teens in August 2009, allowing parents to set up a student account, transfer money into it, and obtain a debit card for student use. The program provides tools to teach teens how to spend money wisely and take responsibility for their actions.
In November 2009, PayPal opened its platform, allowing other services to get access to its code and to use its infrastructure in order to enable peer-to-peer online transactions.PayPal Operations Center and main office located in Omaha, NE
Although PayPal's corporate headquarters are located in San Jose, PayPal's operations center is located in Omaha, Nebraska, where the company employed more than 2,000 people as of 2007. PayPal's European headquarters are in Luxembourg and international headquarters are in Singapore. In October 2007, PayPal opened a data service office on the north side of Austin, Texas. Previously, the company opened a technology center in Scottsdale, Arizona, and Chennai, India.
On November 28, 2011, PayPal reported Black Friday brought record mobile engagement including a 538 percent increase in global mobile payment volume when compared to Black Friday 2010.
The PayPal Buyer Protection Policy states that the customer may file a buyer complaint within 45 days if they did not receive an item or if the item they purchased was significantly not as described. If the buyer used a credit card, they might get a refund via chargeback from their credit-card company. However, in the UK, where such a purchaser is entitled to specific statutory protections (that the credit card company is a second party to the purchase and is therefore equally liable in law if the other party defaults or goes into liquidation) under Section 75 Consumer Credit Act 1979, the purchaser loses this legal protection if the card payment is processed via PayPal.
According to PayPal, it protects sellers in a limited fashion via the Seller Protection Policy. In general the Seller Protection Policy is intended to protect the seller from certain kinds of chargebacks or complaints if seller meets certain conditions including proof of delivery to the buyer. PayPal states the Seller Protection Policy is "designed to protect sellers against claims by buyers of unauthorized payments and against claims of non-receipt of any merchandise". The policy includes a list of "Exclusions" which itself includes "Intangible goods", "Claims for receipt of goods 'not as described'" and "Total reversals over the annual limit". There are also other restrictions in terms of the sale itself, the payment method and the destination country the item is shipped to (simply having a tracking mechanism is not sufficient to guarantee the Seller Protection Policy is in effect). The PayPal Seller Protection Policy does not provide the additional consumer protection afforded by UK consumer legislation (e.g., Sale of Goods Act) and in addition it cannot be enforced in the Courts because PayPal operates from Luxembourg, outside all three of the UK legal jurisdictions.
