PayPal Case Analysis

PayPal: Going Global All
Languages at a Time
Submitted to:
Prof. Saurabh Mittal
Submitted by:
Shahid Ali Dar
Adbhut Anand
Anandeep
Parth Singhai
Kunal Jha

Case Introduction
Company Introduction
Problem Identification
Solution
Questions

PayPal’s corporate headquarter in
San Jose, California

 In the case , the firm redesigned its iconic software to
accommodate the simultaneous languages and refreshes for 15
nationalities and locales, ranging from Poland to France.
 This is how PayPal is updating its local customers based on the
local languages and localizing or customizing the content; with
no expense made on money and time.
 Clearly, the managers find is difficult to manage the business
requirement of flexibility and responsiveness towards the
customers and the controlling the business in its own hands
 Customers now to have the PayPal website presented to them
in their local languages as smoothly as it had been done in
English

 The case presents PayPal’s move to keep all of its consumer
sites updated in a certain country’s local language in order to
keep up with its goal to expand into new markets across the
world.
 In an e-commerce environment where everything runs in a
much faster pace at a more global scale, a company's IT
infrastructure and tools must be adaptable to the changing
needs of the market, e.g. its website must be compatible with
other programs or locales.
 Localizing website content – that is, presenting its website to
the native language of the country where PayPal is being used
by a customer – has become a challenge for the company’s
growth.

 PayPal is a e-commerce payment system that has been used by
millions of people worldwide to send and receive money.
 It has proved to be a reliable system for transferring money,
especially to users that have branch banking accounts under
them.
 When the online retail giant eBay acquired PayPal, there has
been a drastic increase in the use of PayPal as it became the
primary payment system for eBay.
 Almost 95% of e-payments for products and services sold in
eBay are done via PayPal. As eBay customers outside the
United States are growing, global support has become a
necessity for PayPal to meet consumer demand.

 PayPal Holdings Inc. is an American company
operating a worldwide online payments system that
supports online money transfers and serves as an
electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like
checks and money orders.
 PayPal is one of the world's largest Internet payment
company.
 PayPal was established in December 1998 as
Confinity.
 It was founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke
Nosek and Ken Howery.
 PayPal's corporate headquarter is located in San Jose,
California

 As of 2016, PayPal operates in 202 markets and has
188 million active, registered accounts
 PayPal allows customers to send, receive and hold
funds in 25 currencies worldwide.
 It has a total revenue of $9.24 billion (2015) and total
profit of $1.22 billion (2015).
 The PayPal app is available online or at the iTunes
App Store and Google Play.

 Updating all its consumer sites in the local language.
 Lack of availability of technology solution in the
market for language translation.
 There is no clear guidelines in the organization that
who is in charge of what type of content.
 Creating site content in the way that it looks natural
and native to the local and match with their culture.
 The third party translation company charge very high
price for content translation.
 One of the challenges is how to put content
management in the hands of business partners, who
wanted to change themselves without an intermediary.

 PayPal solve localization issue by working with third
party translation company.
 Company set up a small IT team for in-house
development of its code to come-over the language
localization issue.
 PayPal re-architected the software code for its site to
allow simultaneous refreshes for 15 locales ranging
from France to Poland.
 PayPal development team created a tool that color
codes text in the software code base to note newly
added strings of the text that will need translating.

 PayPal’s re-architected code provide a core advantage
over its competitors as company continues to expand
globally.
 By 2008 PayPal translated its site into 15 languages,
accept payments in 17 currencies in 190 markets
globally.
 PayPal handled about $1806 in payment volume per
second in 2007 and its net total payment volume was
$47 billion an increase of 33% over the previous year.
 In the first quarter of 2008, PayPal represent 44% of
net revenue in international business which was $582
million, 33% increase year over year.

1. One of the challenges that PayPal faces now that it
has managed to overcome the poly-lingual obstacle
is finding the best way to put this functionality in the
hands of the business, so that they do not have to go
through IT each time. How do you balance this need
for responsiveness and flexibility versus IT’s need to
keep some degree of control to make sure everything
keeps working with everything else? Provide some
recommendations to managers who find themselves
in this situation.
Case Questions

2. PayPal opted to deviate from industry
standards and build its own custom
technology that would better suit its needs.
When is it a good idea for companies to
take this alternative? What issues factor
into that decision. Provide a discussion
and some examples.

3. Although the new system has been quite successful
PayPal has chosen not to license this technology to
others, forgoing a potentially important revenue
stream given the lack of good solutions to this
problem. Why do you think PayPal chose not to sell
this technology? Do you really think this can be made
into a strategic advantage over their competitors?
How easy would it be for their competitors to imitate
this accomplishment?

PayPal Case Analysis

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PayPal Case Analysis