Consumed by Ebay!

For those of you who haven't heard... The company I work for, Bill Me Later, was bought by Ebay last week. This is a huge step forward for Bill Me Later and will allow us to grow our product across a global scale. Although Bill Me Later as a company will be merging with the PayPal division of Ebay, it will still remain as a separate entity. Bill Me Later will function as the instant credit and promotional financing engine for Ebay and PayPal! You can read more about it here.

Even though I probably would have preferred the IPO route for Bill Me Later, given the current market conditions, I think this is a great move for the company and I'm excited to be a lead developer on one of the largest e-commerce companies on the internet today.

Another plus... Some of the employee benefits that Ebay offers is pretty sweet! I personally dig the 4 week sabbatical they give every employee every 5 years. This means that I can tack on my vacation of 4 weeks + the 4 week sabbatical and have 2 months paid off of work every 5 years. The other plus is that we can now be part of the employee stock purchase plan which gives us the opportunity to purchase ebay at a 15% discount, very nice!

For the geeks out there...

Check out they Ebay architecture here. It's one of the most impressive IT architectures I've ever seen and I'm excited to be a part of it! You can find more details and podcast about it here as well.

Work is good

Well, I've been at Bill Me Later now for 6 months. Things have been going very well and have been very busy. I recently got promoted to the team lead systems developer for one of our components of the real time authorization engine called PayCapture.

PayCapture provides a layer between all of our merchants and the actual authorization engine to help our merchants integrate easily. PayCapture provides many merchants the ability to skip having to integrate with a credit card payment processor since it takes care of all those pieces behind the scenes. PayCapture also provides web services for settlement, hosts dynamic and static web content using Akamai technologies.

Only 5 more layers of management before I take over the company. If my calculations are correct then that's only 2 1/2 more years until I get there...

My new job at "Bill Me Later"

Well, it's been about 1 month now at my new job and I love it! I sit on the 3rd floor of an 8 story building in Timonium, Maryland. I'm one of the senior system engineers that works on developing all of Bill Me Later's software. My main responsibilities currently is development of fraud, authorization, and new authorization flows through our system that help support one of our newest customers Amazon.com. Bill Me Later is now on a large majority of merchant websites including but not limited too (walmart, apple, overstock.com, US-airways, ToysRus, and many more).

What is Bill Me Later?

Put simply, Bill Me Later (corporate) is the best way to pay when shopping online. You can access the Bill Me Later customer website for logging in and paying your bills here. This is where you manager your Bill Me Later account and choose to either get bills in the mail or pay your bills online through an ACH transfer.

Why use it?

• It allows you to buy stuff online without the need to have a credit card or bank account. You only need to know your date of birth and last 4 digits of your SSN #. How many times have you been in a different room then your credit card, but you wanted to buy something? It happens to me all the time, but now with Bill Me Later that will never happen again. It's so easy to pay that it's almost dangerous!
  
• It's the most secure way to buy stuff online as well because there is no credit card information stored on a customer website that could be compromised.
• All liability for purchases is put on Bill Me Later in case of fraud. And Bill Me Later has excellent fraud prevention techniques.
  
• No interest/payments for 90 days on most purchases. Sometimes it's even longer depending on promotions and merchants.
  

Isn't it the same as Paypal or Google Checkout?

No, they are quite different. Paypal and google force you to store your bank information and/or credit card number in their system (Not secure). And they do not offer interest free financing. These 2 options also require you to already have an existing credit card in order to use them.

Note: Since Bill Me Later is an open line of credit, be aware that if you don't pay your bill in full when it's due that you'll be charged interest. It works almost like any other credit card behind the scenes.