Lessons learned from the Paypal PPK Plastiq deal

Plastiq sent out an email yesterday:

Hi Vinh, PayPal has notified us they will no longer be allowing PayPal Key debit card payments through Plastiq when your PayPal wallet is linked to a credit card. Here are a few options so you can still make your payments successfully. As of now, PayPal continues to allow Plastiq payments from a PayPal Key debit card with wallets linked to another debit card, bank account, or existing PayPal balance. Please make sure you adjust any scheduled payments. Of course Plastiq also offers numerous other ways to make your payments outside of PayPal Key. You can pay with any major credit1 or debit card, or use our new cash payment feature.2 Log in here and add a new payment method. Thanks for choosing Plastiq as your one-stop payment platform. We’re excited to continue helping you pay your way by releasing new features and improvements you’ve asked for.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, this was probably the MS deal of the year. If you already had a trained Plastiq account, you could use any credit card behind PPK and generate points at a cost of 1 cent. This beats going out and doing VGC since that also costs 1 cent AND ALSO THE LIQUIDATION HASSLE. And you could have done serious volume! Like “Hey I paid for a Tesla with my Chase Sapphire Reserve” kind of volume but not with a CSR of course, kind of volume.

What’s the lesson learned here? Well, if you didn’t have a Plastiq account, then you should have created one a long time ago when they were doing no fee MGC or whatnot. You’re inundated with new things like Plastiq, Binji, Zero, etc all the time and may overlook it, but if you spend time at least creating accounts and testing it, then something may change down the road and now the ugly duckling has become a beautiful swan.

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