Business World Blog

Many of you probably use the popular online wallet paypal to send money online and to accept credit card payments, etc. on your website. However, if you haven’t experienced it already, paypal probably has one of the most ridicoulous customer service that you could find anywhere.

Here’s a first hand experience that has been repeated quite a few times. This, by the way, is a great way to lose a nice big number of customers (or at least want to make them leave).

As you may or may not know, paypal has a $500 limit on withdrawls until you can verify your identity, which is great and all fine and dandy. They do require 2/3 forms of identification currently – either your social security #, your bank account verfied, or your credit card verified. Of course, being a business, we have no social security #, but a EIN #, which paypal doesn’t take. That leaves us to the bank account and credit card options. Bank account wise, it was no problem, we got that verified right away. However, credit card verification wise, the system didn’t allow us to do it!

So of course, being a business that transacts 5 digits per month through paypal, we call their priority customer service #, which (it’d be a damn concidence!) sounds just like the normal #. Wow, selected # of customers get this “awesome” service? Yeah, great. After that you’re greeted by a series of random stuff you have to pick from, like “My Account”, “Transactions”, etc. Like how the hell am I supposed to know what falls under “My Account” and why do I give a crap?

After screaming “Operator” into the phone for about 4 minutes and having the automated system tell me a few times “Your query is not recognized”, it finally starts ringing, ringing, ringing…  only to be answered by an answering machine telling me that the wait time is over 5 minutes. Gee, that’s nice to know.

20 minutes later, some lady with a really thick accent picks up and asks me what the problem is. After a long and patient explanation, she finally understood the problem, and gave me her amazing solution: “Sorry sir, that’s just the way the system works. You either have to enter your social security (which we don’t have, duh) # or your visa credit card #(which doesn’t work. If visa doesn’t work, you can try a mastercard or discover card”. Uh, right. I’m suppose to have one of those handy just so I can take out the $5k in the account?

So, being kind of irritated, I asked to be transferred to a supervisor. Again, a nice 20 minute wait. Yeah, that’ll really make your customers happy. Again, the same schpiel.

You know, if you want businesses to process transactions at your place, how about making it easy to actually get paid? How do you have a friggen bug in your system that prevents businesses from being able to withdraw their funds when they have all the information you need, and then tell them that’s the way it is when they call?

Yeah, so taking out the $50k paypal account account at $500/month… whoopie doo, $49,500 to go!

This weekend, I was sitting at a Malaysian restaurant with my girlfriend when it struck me how easy it’d become to come up with new business ideas. This is probably one of the best Malaysian restaurants in Queens, and is just run by a small family.

As we sat there, we started looking a small exerpt from Eat Out magazine. Wow, apparantly the restaurant had been around for 13 years and have been recommended in various periodocials. Yet, the whole restaurant was just about 6 tables in total, in the exact same location. Apparantly, expanding the business really wasn’t at the top of their list.

As the evening wore on, we shifted our conversation to our impending move into the Manhattan from Queens. Too bad this Malaysian restaurant isn’t going to be in New York. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone moved this food over there?

And there you have it – a simple discussion about current events just lead to a very real need, which can be filled by a very real business. It’s very simple. There’s good Malaysian food in Queens and people would like to have good Malaysian food in Manhattan. So out of this, here’s a few very simple ideas that probably have a lot of room for growth:

- Try to buy recipes from such small stores and start your own restaurant

- Have them share the recipe with you and profit share on what you make

- Find the foods you enjoy and start a bunch of chain restaurants doing that

Not only is it very obvious what you need to do, there’s also a huge room for growth if it works out. You can:

- Start a company that collects best recipes from local places and start a restaurant chain that rotates some of these best.

- Become some sort of amazing recipe reseller

With some persistance and luck, that’s probably a 10s of million dollar company right there. 

If something as simple as a discussion about my current life circumstances can lead to an interesting business idea – just imagine the opportunities that sourround you when you’re actually looking!

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