BidPay

» see bidpay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

BidPay was built on an instrument I have never held. The money order is an ordinary object in American life, a piece of paper you buy with cash and post to somebody who does not know you, and it has no real equivalent in the way money moved around me. Money here went between bank accounts. It did not travel in envelopes, and no service I used has ever asked for my mailing address in order to pay somebody.

It started in 1999, founded by Steve Chin and Marek Bradbury, and the problem it was built for was specific to that year. eBay had made it normal to buy something from a stranger two thousand miles away. There was no normal way to pay that stranger. Sellers wanted a check or a money order because those clear; buyers had a credit card and no way to point it at a private individual.

BidPay stood in the gap by being half online and half postal. You entered the card details and the auction information on a web page, and BidPay bought a Western Union money order and mailed it to the seller. The buyer paid the fees. For about two years it was one of the few ways that transaction could be completed at all.

~ the record ~

~ how it actually worked ~

The design tells you what people were frightened of in 1999. Nobody trusted a stranger with a card number and nobody trusted a stranger to ship the goods, so BidPay put a name everybody already knew in the middle of it. A Western Union money order is not a promise from a website. It is a piece of paper the seller can take somewhere and turn into money, and that was the entire product.

First Data and Western Union bought the company in 2001 for a price nobody disclosed, and in 2003 renamed it Western Union Auction Payments. That lasted about a year. Customers thought they were being sold a wire transfer, which is a different service with different costs, and the name went back to BidPay in 2004. A payments company had bought a brand and then covered it with its own, which is the kind of decision that looks free on a slide.

~ the two deaths ~

PayPal ended it. Not by being cheaper, which it sometimes was, but by finishing the transaction on the same day instead of on the day the mail arrived. Once a seller could see the money land before packing the box, an instrument that spent three days in transit had nothing left to offer. Western Union stopped operating BidPay on 31 December 2005.

Then it came back. CyberSource paid $1.8 million for the name and the code in March 2006 and relaunched it that June with the economics turned around, so that sellers paid the fees at 2.5 percent plus fifty cents at home and 2.9 percent abroad. That is a merchant account with an auction label on it, and it was competing directly with PayPal on PayPal's own terms in the year PayPal was becoming a verb. CyberSource announced the end in 2007 and BidPay stopped for good on 31 December of that year.

~ what got buried with it ~

Two shutdowns eight years apart, both landing on the last day of December, which is what happens when the people closing a service want it off the books before the new fiscal year rather than at any moment that means anything to a customer.

What went with it is the last serious attempt to run internet payments through the post. For a few years the fastest way to settle a debt with a stranger online genuinely involved a mail carrier, and the companies building around that assumption were not being stupid. They were being early. The idea that money could move as fast as the message describing it had not been demonstrated yet, and BidPay is what the interim looked like.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »