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I'm working at a startup that processes millions of dollars per month in payments. If you don't offer PayPal, you're shooting yourself in the foot. In many coun

by skylark 11y ago

I'm working at a startup that processes millions of dollars per month in payments. If you don't offer PayPal, you're shooting yourself in the foot. In many countries, PayPal is the defacto way people conduct online transactions. As much love as Stripe gets because of how developer friendly it is, in the real world people use what they know. And what they know is PayPal. I don't see a compelling reason not to offer it as an option.

yc1010 11y ago
Waking up one day to find that "your" money is no longer yours is not a compelling reason? I myself had nothing but bad experience with Paypal going back almost a decade, hell with them.
quasse 11y ago
Luckily I need to accept payments mostly from government customers, which means mostly ACH and debit card. I think PayPal would be seen as pretty mickey mouse actually.
robryan 11y ago
Agreed, we offer Credit Card and Paypal and have close to half our customers using PayPal. In terms of the horror stories I think it depends a lot on your business. For someone like us sending relatively predictable large volume through in the mostly $25-$150 range we have never had an issue. At most we probably only ever had a $50k exposure to PayPal as you can withdraw as often as you want.
mcv 11y ago
This is what pains me the most: the fact that PayPal is considered the biggest standard, when they are really terrible. Netherland has proper internet payment infrastructure called iDeal: it goes directly from one bank account to the other, with no sleazy middlemen in between. That's what the rest of the world should be using, but Netherland just doesn't have the weight to push its solutions on the rest of the world, so we're stuck with crap like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. (I suspect many other countries also have well-working payment systems within their borders, but none have any international reach. I'd expect that SEPA would lead to a reliable internet payment system on a European scale, but that hasn't happened yet.)

by skylark 11y ago

yc1010 11y ago

Waking up one day to find that "your" money is no longer yours is not a compelling reason? I myself had nothing but bad experience with Paypal going back almost a decade, hell with them.

quasse 11y ago

Luckily I need to accept payments mostly from government customers, which means mostly ACH and debit card. I think PayPal would be seen as pretty mickey mouse actually.

robryan 11y ago

Agreed, we offer Credit Card and Paypal and have close to half our customers using PayPal. In terms of the horror stories I think it depends a lot on your business. For someone like us sending relatively predictable large volume through in the mostly $25-$150 range we have never had an issue. At most we probably only ever had a $50k exposure to PayPal as you can withdraw as often as you want.

mcv 11y ago

This is what pains me the most: the fact that PayPal is considered the biggest standard, when they are really terrible. Netherland has proper internet payment infrastructure called iDeal: it goes directly from one bank account to the other, with no sleazy middlemen in between. That's what the rest of the world should be using, but Netherland just doesn't have the weight to push its solutions on the rest of the world, so we're stuck with crap like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard. (I suspect many other countries also have well-working payment systems within their borders, but none have any international reach. I'd expect that SEPA would lead to a reliable internet payment system on a European scale, but that hasn't happened yet.)