[Vrondi]

At the time PayPal rolled out, the single feature that made it popular in the USA is that it provided eBay sellers an easy/cheap way to receive credit card payments from buyers. That is all. Any person could set up a PayPal and instantly start receiving credit card payments without setting up a vendor account with a credit card company (which was not trivial at that time).

[lmm]

Right. But that was only relevant because US customers wanted to pay by credit card (because of some combination of credit cards being good and other payment methods being bad in the US). Which was not the case in most of Europe.