What happens to payment processors? Is it a death of e-commerce?

Do you remember the beginning of this year? It was a time when the payment processors were fighting for any customer using all methods, including black PR and ddos attacks. Forums were bursting with posts, banners… We were excited and thought that it will last forever and we will get a healthy e-commerce and the best payment processing services provided by the competing online payment gateways.

And what do we have today? There is just a couple of payment systems that work steady, without any serious failures and claims of the customers. The beloved PayPal is damned today due to the withdrawal problems happened every day. These days many eBay sellers complain that they fail to transfer their funds to their bank accounts and that they constantly get one and the same system reply: “Sorry, an error occurred after you clicked the last link”.

The situation with e-gold is better as it seemed to be developing however the system will need at least one or two years to resume the previous work. Today it is still impossible to create any new accounts however the work of the existing users also became almost impossible. Or it’s better to say impossible without the presenting the necessary ID files. The system that became possible only owing to its anonymity will hardly get the same popularity with its new requirements. By the way, there are some people who say that they cannot send their documents as system rejects them. In other words, e-gold is not ready to its innovations itself. The processor is not very good and comfortable as a whole, so it is noncompetitive against the today’s payment gateways. Knowing that troubles the admins of e-gold started to reconstruct their creature and offered to present an ideal product very soon. Who knows, may be they will succeed though…. Having monitored the today’s tendencies we found that people are tired with numerous promises and they are not interested in e-gold anymore.

Immediately after the news about fake bankruptcy and the e-gold’s trial the Internet society started to guess the new leader on the online payment processing market. There were some candidates: LibertyReserve, AlterGold, PerfectMoney and C-Gold. So, what do we have today? 

AlterGold… Actually we don’t have it anymore. After the months of endless disputes and attacks the site has finally gone. All the attempts to reach the site end with one and the same picture: a white screen and the following words: 

502 Bad Gateway (connection refused)

If you are receiving this response, the customer server refusing connections from our proxy. 
We are only serving as an intermediate proxy in this matter and do not manage or control the actual web site or servers. Please contact support for the website you are trying to reach. 
Thank you.

Proxy Shield

We think that other words and objections are worthless as everything is clear. 

LibertyReserve. This payment system is popular today, however not everything is smooth there. More and more people claim that they have problems with login, with deposit/withdraw operations. And finally LR is very often down. So was today when we tried to access and found only the following words: "404 page not found." Now everything is ok, however a real leader should not have such failures. Let alone that the real leader should trust its clients and shouldn’t lock their accounts. 

Perfect Money is more or less “perfect” in comparison to its rivals listed above. However, it also have some nuances. One of them is a short list of funding/withdrawal methods. We remember that originally the processor offered 3 payment gateways to load the accounts, namely e-gold, webmoney and pecunix. However, in several months after the launch only one payment system left – pecunix. The system is not very popular, so PM has created not very comfortable situation. Though it is necessary to say that at the beginning of the present week this payment system has added LR to the list of funding option but fact is a fact: Perfect Money has lost a perfect funding tool presented by WebMoney. 

We can say nothing about cGold as this payment system is very silent and only its devoted users know about some system news. No ads, no banners, nothing... It seems that the system is not interested in attraction of new customers; hence it is not a leader.

One more leaders of e-payment market is eBullion, though its better to use it with prefix “ex-” and a verb “was” as there is no such processor anymore. After the murder of Pamela Fayed and the arrest of her husband the system stopped its operation. On August 5 the admin of the site was put an announcement that the system will be unavailable for several hours and left forever. That announcement was there for 3 months. Today when we entered the site we failed to find it, as well as anything on the site. We saw only a white screen without any signs of activity. The same situation with the domain e-currency.com owned by eBullion. All signs of death, eBullion has passed away. 

Other payment systems are not serious to rely on them or too small and local to become the leader on the international market. The only exception is Webmoney however the system is also a little bit strange. May be it can be explained by its origin however it has restricted to exchange its e-currency to any other currency, in other words it wants to be a monopolist. And all of us know what the monopoly can lead to. Yes, to regress. We will return to the start, back to 1996 when the first payment system, e-gold was launched. Today we see a kind of death of the e-payment market, as idleness of the market is a death of the whole industry. It is very hard to admit but the whole life circle of e-payment market was only 12 years. A very short life, isn’t it?