Paypal, an e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet, offers more protection to its users who purchase to millions of Paypal-accredited retailers from 196 countries worldwide effective Nov. 1, 2010, Businesswire reports.

“PayPal is committed to giving customers a safer online experience through privacy, prevention and protection,” said Katherine Hutchison, senior director for global risk management at PayPal. “When you use PayPal this holiday shopping season and beyond, you can have peace of mind knowing that we’re offering even more protection if something goes wrong.”

Recognizing the popularity of internet shopping and the increased online transactions made by consumers, Paypal will cover shoppers on merchant websites if they don’t get the item they ordered, or received a different item from what they purchased which are very common mishaps around online transactions, as part of their expanded protection. Paypal’s buyer protection was first enjoyed by eBay on select purchases only. Paypal protection are reliable for the following reasons:

* PayPal never shares a buyer’s financial information with sellers, privacy is built into the service.
* PayPal provides zero liability for eligible unauthorized transactions on PayPal accounts.
* PayPal has one of the most sophisticated anti-fraud models in the payments industry, which gets smarter and stronger with every transaction that goes through our system – and PayPal has processed billions of transactions in the past 11 years. With this technology, PayPal often detects and stops fraudulent activity the moment it occurs and before it ever reaches our customers.

The steps are strategic for PayPal in its efforts to maintain customer relations, on the shopper and merchant end.  Payment methods are taking on several virtualized characteristics, outside of PayPal.  This means PayPal needs to stay on top of trends, particularly as many cloud services in the retailer industry are beginning to layer in niche features to address certain web-based retail needs.