[If you’re looking for PayPal customer support, the number is 073-713-7777 and is open 9am to 6pm Sunday through Thursday.]
Since we find ourselves often reporting about PayPal usage in Israel, I thought our readers would want to know that PayPal is now available in Hebrew! Well, kind of. Here’s the link, but no matter which language I select for the interface (top-right corner of the screen), I see English. It seems that the roll out hasn’t been so smooth. But PayPal has a .co.il domain name, so that’s a good sign. Here’s a screenshot in the meantime:
This is an important end to a serious usage barrier that existed until now for PayPal in Israel. Israeli merchants couldn’t really use PayPal as long as the interface for customers was in English, and it certainly makes life easier for them in terms of setting up their accounts.
It’s kind of funny that PayPal released a Hebrew version, since last week I gave a lecture to a group of Gush Katif evacuees on how to use PayPal in order to sell their art to a wider market. (Fact: unemployment in Gush Katif hovered around 0%. Since the Jewish residents were removed from the area, their employment rate is around 30%.) The group did not speak English, and found the English interface to be daunting. I told them that PayPal had mentioned plans to make PayPal Hebrew, but I didn’t foresee that happening any time soon. Nice to see I was wrong.
Here’s my presentation (in Hebrew, with English screenshots), which is a basic intro to getting started with ecommerce and PayPal: