You wouldn’t think it possible, but PayPal almost got me excited! Yes I know payment services are a little dull, but they’ve introduced a fantastic feature in the US and it appeared in my PayPal account so of course I subscribed immediately. Sadly it’s a mistake and PayPal are in the process of removing it from UK users accounts.
The feature is a downloaded PayPal plug-in for Internet Explorer and add-on for Firefox. Once installed it allows you to make payments to any website that accepts MasterCard even if they don’t accept PayPal.
To make the payment the plug-in creates a pseudo one time MasterCard debit card number. Once the card is used it can’t be used again so you never have to worry about online fraud. You can generate a unique Secure Card number on the spot for a particular purchase and you’re 100% protected from subsequent unauthorised purchases using that card.
Making the service even easier to use is the autofill which can populate checkout forms with contact information and addresses at the click of a button. No more manually typing your address each time you purchase from a new website. At the same time the plug-in will warn you if you’re visiting a suspicious website.
So all in all it’s a great feature, one time secure debit cards, the ability to use PayPal on sites that don’t accept PayPal, autofill of checkout information and fraud alerts for dodgy websites. Even better is that it puts PayPal directly on your browser, you can pay without visiting the PayPal website. What a shame it’s not available in the UK!
2 Responses
Well thats annoying i was just about to try out what i had downloaded and installed and you burst my bubble 😛
what a grand idea, and once again, only available in the usa *sigh*
just like virtual terminal was, but now included with paypal pro. wish they had made their mind up on that before i subscribved to a PDQ machine…..
Hi Nick, it’s still available in my PayPal account as well…. seems to be taking them a long time to kill it from UK accounts that it’s not applicable to 🙁