Once upon a time I owned www.paypalshopping.com. I’m not going to get into specifics of how or why I acquired the domain. Not important or relevant to this discussion. What you need to know is that about a year ago, I gave this URL to PayPal.
And sadly, they’re just redirecting it to www.paypal-shopping.com, which is a pretty crummy site.
As I hate to see a good thing go to waste, here are some ideas for PayPal:
-Redirect the URL to http://paypal.thefind.com/, which searches only PayPal stores. And then let them have some lattitude to test/track. TheFind has done a solid job on Bill Me Later Shopping. [Note to TheFind: the terms of service on BML Shopping still refer to Become.com]
-Give the URL to Shopping.com and tell them to do the same thing TheFind is doing with paypal.thefind.com. Less stores, but at least you’ll keep it in the family. And Shopping.com is making all their merchants switch to PayPal for billing, so you already know their merchants have accounts with PayPal.
-Give the URL to Shopping.com and tell them to create an Epinions clone (as they have at PriceTool).
-Jump on the Cashback bandwagon (Bing!) and copy paypalshopping.co.uk, which redirects to PayPal Offers.
-Just in time for the holiday shopping season, create an awesome coupon site and list offers from all your merchants.
-Give the site to a super affiliate like David Lewis who knows coupons and cashback and let him optimize the site.
-Give the site back to me.
Brian, thanks for the mention.
I would love to help Paypal build its own shopping site. There is so much that could be done with the tools that eBay has. Cashbaq would be a great way to bring it all together and make Paypal that much more valuable.
If anyone at Paypal is interested, you can reach me at david @ cashbaq [dot] com or thedavidlewis @ gmail [dot] com.
-David
P.S. I also have a suggestion for Mass Pay which is missing an important piece for bulk users.