Chapter 12 Case Study: Paypal – Going Global All Languages at a Time.
Case Study: PayPal – Going Global all Languages at a Time.
1. One of the challenges that PayPal faces now that they have managed to overcome the polylingual obstacle is finding the best way to put this functionality in the hands of the business, so that they do not have to go through IT each time. How do you balance this need for responsiveness and flexibility versus IT’s need to keep some degree of control to make sure everything keeps working with everything else? Provide some recommendations to managers who find themselves in this situation.
The case presents PayPal’s move to keep all of its consumer sites updated in a certain country’s local language in order to keep up with its goal to expand into new markets across the world. In an e-commerce environment where everything runs in a much faster pace at a more global scale, a company's IT infrastructure and tools must be adaptable to the changing needs of the market, e.g. its website must be compatible with other programs or locales. Localizing website content – that is, presenting its website to the native language of the country where PayPal is being used by a customer – has become a challenge for the company’s growth. PayPal is a e-commerce payment system that has been used by millions of people worldwide to send and receive money. It has proved to be a reliable system for transferring money, especially to users that have branch banking accounts under them. When the online retail giant eBay acquired PayPal, there has been a drastic increase in the use of PayPal as it became the primary payment system for eBay. Almost 95% of e-payments for products and services sold in eBay are done via PayPal. As eBay customers outside the United States are growing, global support has become a necessity for PayPal to meet consumer demand. Customers now want to have the PayPal website presented to them in their local languages as smoothly as it had been done in English. There are now hundreds of multi-lingual translation
1. One of the challenges that PayPal faces now that they have managed to overcome the polylingual obstacle is finding the best way to put this functionality in the hands of the business, so that they do not have to go through IT each time. How do you balance this need for responsiveness and flexibility versus IT’s need to keep some degree of control to make sure everything keeps working with everything else? Provide some recommendations to managers who find themselves in this situation.
The case presents PayPal’s move to keep all of its consumer sites updated in a certain country’s local language in order to keep up with its goal to expand into new markets across the world. In an e-commerce environment where everything runs in a much faster pace at a more global scale, a company's IT infrastructure and tools must be adaptable to the changing needs of the market, e.g. its website must be compatible with other programs or locales. Localizing website content – that is, presenting its website to the native language of the country where PayPal is being used by a customer – has become a challenge for the company’s growth. PayPal is a e-commerce payment system that has been used by millions of people worldwide to send and receive money. It has proved to be a reliable system for transferring money, especially to users that have branch banking accounts under them. When the online retail giant eBay acquired PayPal, there has been a drastic increase in the use of PayPal as it became the primary payment system for eBay. Almost 95% of e-payments for products and services sold in eBay are done via PayPal. As eBay customers outside the United States are growing, global support has become a necessity for PayPal to meet consumer demand. Customers now want to have the PayPal website presented to them in their local languages as smoothly as it had been done in English. There are now hundreds of multi-lingual translation