Paypal Goes Phishing?

Paypal is one of the internet’s great success stories and whether you love them or hate them there’s no doubt at all that they have enabled a lot of people to make money on the internet easily. If you don’t believe it, just try applying for a ‘real’ merchant account for internet usage and see how complex and expensive it can get.

That aside, Paypal need to keep up with changing trends and opportunities, right? So they’ve now, apparently, created a niftly little widget for your blog that will enable you to sell products easily. You can have multiple products, good descriptions and images and the payment is all handled, securely, by Paypal.

Wonderful.

But why, and I mean WHY?, have they set up a site for the widget that looks like it’s a phishing site? Wouldn’t it make sense to have it within the main Paypal interface? Or at the very least have it on the Paypal domain name?

As it is, those who are security conscious may well steer clear of the links to the site for this widget. I mean, www.storefront.paypallabs.com doesn’t exactly inspire you with confidence, does it? Especially when there’s a login button on that site that looks like a scam artist’s poorly worded attempt to get your details.

I suspect it’s genuinely Paypal (but I’m too chicken to try it) and I think it may very well prove to be a useful widget, but it seems odd that they’ve done it this way, even if they’re wanting to brand it slightly differently.

Time will tell of course and we’ll see how many blogs suddenly appear with this widget. It’s only in beta at the moment so no doubt lots will change before it’s released properly.