The PayPal (http://www.PayPal.com/) is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com. Documentation was founded in December 1998 by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek, initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company. X.com was founded by Elon Musk in March 1999, initially as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999. Both companies were located on University Avenue in Palo Alto.

There are 3 main causes for the success of PayPal. Firstly, PayPal makes convenient for people to pay or get paid as PayPal operates in 190 markets, and it manages over 164 million accounts. PayPal allows customers to send, receive, and hold funds in 18 currencies worldwide. These currencies are the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, Chinese renminbi yuan (only available for some Chinese accounts, see below), euro, pound sterling, Japanese yen, Czech koruna, Danish krone, Hong Kong dollar, Hungarian forint, Israeli new sheqel, Mexican peso, New Zealand dollar, Norwegian krone, Polish zloty, Singapore dollar, Swedish krona, Swiss franc and U.S. dollar. PayPal operates locally in 13 countries. With this, PayPal has quickly become a global leader in online payment solutions.

Secondly, it is safe for trading in PayPal due to its safety and protection policies. According to PayPal, it protects sellers in a limited fashion via the Seller Protection Policy. In general, the Seller Protection Policy is intended to protect the seller from certain kinds of charge backs or complaints if seller meets certain conditions including proof of delivery to the buyer. So, they can feel safe when both parties decide to use the PayPal. In early 2007, it also has provided security key as an additional protection against fraud. The users can prevent their account being compromised by a malicious third party without access to the physical security key.

Lastly, PayPal has received more than 20 awards for excellence from the internet industry and the business community- most recently the 2006 Webby Award for Best Financial Services Site and the 2006 Webby People's Voice Award for Best Financial Services Site. It has developed the good reputation and people trust it can provide the better services to them. It becomes the good choice for people to make the payments and do business.

In 2002, PayPal has been acquired by eBay.

References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal