[thirdsun]

I strongly disagree. The main advantage of Paypal and the reason for its popularity in Germany was the fact that it provided instant payments at a time when credit cards were very uncommon.

Cash on delivery was a huge pain since you had to potentially large amounts of cash ready to hand over to your postman upon delivery. That's the opposite of convenient.

Alternatively you could pay by bank wire transfer, which of course led to an additional delay of a day or two until your transfer actually arrived at the sellers bank account. Nobody wants to deal with barriers like these in ecommerce. Paypal was a godsend back then. Remember, barely anyone had a credit card in those days in Germany.