1. Client: PayPalCountry : Hong KongPublication : The StandardSection : MoneyDate: 09 July 2012Topic : Online payment pioneer comes of agehttp://www.thestandard.com.hk/news_detail.asp?URL : we_cat=16&art_id=124125&sid=36970967&con_type=1&d_str=&fc=1Circulation : 222,413

2. The Standard 09 Jul Online payment pioneer comes of ageE-commerce has revolutionized sales and our shopping culture in the past decade.Paypal, the worlds largest online payment firm, serves as a bridge between sellers and buyers acrossthe world. It has gradually changed the shopping habits in Hong Kong.Paypal is the online payment arm of Ebay - the biggest multinational customer-to-customer e-commerce operator - which supports payments in 25 currencies and is currently available in 190markets.Paypals first-quarter revenue rose 32 percent year on year to US$1.3 billion (HK$10.08 billion),representing 40 percent of Ebays income during the period."To display goods online is more cost-effective than offline shops, especially for start-ups and a largergroup of audiences," said Kerry Wong, managing director of PayPal Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwan.Rents, labor cost and the choice of appropriate physical location for a shop can be challenging tosellers, Wong said, adding smaller sellers have to deal with one more headache."Smaller businesses have to set up a banking account for card acceptance. But buyers might bereluctant to pay unauthorized sellers directly."Paypal carries a set of marketing campaigns to encourage buyers to shop online, and guides sellersto tap into overseas markets.The e-commerce payment platform, established in 1998, saw commerce through social networking inHong Kong becoming increasingly essential.It booked over 8,000 daily transactions in smartphones and tablets in the SAR.Although apparel ranks as the most desired shopping item among Paypal users in Hong Kong, themainland and Taiwan, local online purchase habits differ, according to the Nielsen Co which surveyed600 online shoppers in each region.In Hong Kong, financial products, services and insurance are the most popular, while health andbeauty products are more welcome on the mainland. Books win out in Taiwan.E-shoppers in the SAR favor airline tickets, computer hardware and travel packages.The survey also found that about 2 million online shoppers in Hong Kong spent US$991 per head lastyear, and the size of the citys e-shopping market value reached US$1.9 billion. It is expected to topUS$2.5 billion by 2015.Online business operators, including Visa and MasterCard networks, and Chinese business-to-business e-commerce giant Alibaba, strove to seize a slice of the market."We welcome the competition, which helps improve the quality of the online payment market," saidPaypals Wong. But she does not see direct competitors, given Paypals wide global coverage and itsacceptance of various currencies.In the first three months of this year, Paypal, with 110 million active users worldwide, transactedUS$4,300 in total payment volume every second, and settled more than 6 million payments per day.Transaction security is the cornerstone of online payment business, Wong said. Paypal uses artificialintelligence and has 2,000 staff who keep the platform safe. 3. The firm booked a fraud rate of merely 0.15 percent within its global network which is 10 times betterthan its rivals.In a bid to improve its capacity for innovation, Paypal hosts an annual staff competition on new ideasand puts the most feasible ones into practice.Most of the firms local staff are young and technology-savvy, and they are given enough room to becreative.