Summing up Recommended List of PayPal Bingo Sites by Top Of The Shop Bingo
What is PayPal?
PayPal is a large American company responsible for operating the world’s most widely used electronic payments service. This service is used as an alternative to payment by cash or cheque and has become one of the most frequently used methods for making deposits at online bingo sites. It has been estimated that the company currently employs around 30,000 people worldwide. It is so large that it lists three separate headquarters: Corporate HQ is based in San Jose, California, while Worldwide Operations are controlled at La Vista in Omaha, Nebraska. Meanwhile, its International Headquarters are situated in Singapore.
How do you use PayPal at a bingo site?
Making deposits to your bingo site via PayPal could not be simpler. First you need to sign up by giving a few personal details, like your name and e-mail address. Then you need to create a secure password. Finally, you just need to link your PayPal account to your bank account, or debit card or credit card account.
There are many advantages to this. It’s quick, easy and cheap. There are no charges to you, the bingo player, for using the service. Instead, PayPal makes its money by charging the bingo site owner you are depositing with for a small commission. Money is transferred to the bingo site directly from your linked account.
This is especially easy and quick, because instead of having to enter all your banking details each time you make a deposit, all you need is your PayPal password, and everything is taken care of. It is also more secure, because your personal financial details are not passed on to the online bingo site. In fact, they are not required at all, so your details cannot be used fraudulently or intercepted (via insecure public Wi-Fi networks for example).
It’s all completely free in almost every case. The main exception is if your purchase requires any kind of currency conversion: for example if your own account is held in pounds sterling and you are paying the seller in dollars. But for conventional purchases within the United Kingdom, no fees apply. This is highly unlikely as pretty much all bingo sites are based within the UK and all accept GBP.
Plus you get the extra reassurance of PayPal’s Buyer Protection scheme. This scheme provides effective insurance against your goods failing to be as described by the seller, or even not turning up at all. If this occurs, PayPal can refund your money in full directly to you. It will claim the money back from the retailer itself, saving you the hassle of chasing things up yourself.
PayPal also continues to develop new and more convenient services all the time. Perhaps the most important recent development is the release of the PayPal app. So many of today’s payments are made on the go via mobile phones, rather than the old fashioned way sat at a desktop PC or Mac. Needless to say, PayPal have moved with the times, making things as easy for smart phone users as possible.
The main advantage of downloading the app is the quickness and convenience of payment. Not only can you use PayPal for your usual internet transactions, you can even use it to pay your friends. All you need to do is enter your e-mail address or phone number and add your contacts simply by scrolling through your address book. Then you can make payments to your friends which they will receive in their account almost instantaneously. The average transfer time is around 20 seconds, so it really should be true to say it takes less than a minute! You can even keep track of all your payments via the app on your phone.
The launch of the app must be regarded as a success. In 2016, over $100bn worth of payments were made in total, from around 2bn mobile transactions worldwide, leaving PayPal firmly as the world’s favourite from of electronic payment.
Some Background History to PayPal
The company was founded in 1998, so it has undergone phenomenal growth: in less than twenty years it has developed from its humble beginnings as the small money transfer business Confinity, to the multi-national operating global behemoth it is today.
Growth was rapid from the very start. In 2000 it merged with X.com, an online banking company which had been founded by the now world renowned tycoon Elon Musk. Musk had spotted the worldwide potential of Confinity’s payment system and set about focusing all his energies on the PayPal service. So much so that his own X.com company was renamed PayPal the following year. The service continued to grow, leading to its public launch on the New York Stock Exchange in 2002, generating over $60m.
Needless to say, the rapid development did not end there. Progress continued almost immediately after the public launch, as the new company was acquired by eBay for $1.5bn in the summer of the same year. And it was this move that led to the ultimate worldwide domination the company enjoys today.
eBay was already on the way to becoming a worldwide phenomenon. It was and remains the world’s premier online market place. But when handling payments between people who never meet and may indeed not even be in the same country, a quick, simple, secure and trustworthy method of transferring funds was essential. This was even more important because the majority of traders were just ordinary consumers who did not have the facility to accept credit or debit payments. PayPal became the system which solved this issue.
Around three quarters of all eBay auctions accepted PayPal as on option for payment, with around one quarter of all transactions being successfully completed using this method. It became the default choice for settling transactions, and all its less efficient rivals were subsequently closed over the succeeding years.
By 2010, PayPal had already achieved global success, with over 100 million active customers in close to 200 countries across the world. It also operated in 25 different currencies, making it the electronic payment method of choice for the vast majority of the world’s consumers.
The company is no longer owned by eBay, having been spun off from the internet market place company in 2015. Nevertheless, its remarkable growth continues to this day. In 2016 it was admitted to the Fortune 500 list for the first time, a listing of the 500 largest American corporations by revenue.
Today, the company claims over 200 million active account holders in more than 200 countries across the globe. It accepts payments in more than 100 currencies, operating actual accounts in 25 different currencies. In the last financial year for which figures are available at the time of writing (2016), its total worldwide revenue amounted to just under $11bn, from over 6 billion individual transactions across the globe.
