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That wisdom is past it's use-by date. Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account[1]. Prior to this, paypal gave you access t
by Sir_Substance 10y ago
That wisdom is past it's use-by date.
Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account[1]. Prior to this, paypal gave you access to an audience of anyone with a credit card. Now that they don't, your low-friction audience is restricted to people with actively used paypal accounts, which is pretty much 15-30 year old guys, and no one else. If you know anything about online sales, you'll know that any increased friction at checkout is a bad thing. Requiring people to make a paypal account at checkout time is probably dropping 20% of all customers and 70% of customers over 50. If you wanted to know why physical shops still exist, that's why.
You get a vastly wider reach with plain old Visa/Mastercard support, because anyone with a credit card can use it, no signup required. All adults have at least a Visa Electron (or regional equivalent), even if they don't have a real credit card, because that's what banks give out by default these days. Hell, most children will have them.
Normal credit card support is fine.
[1] By default at least. Paypals documentation[2] states this is still possible, but I haven't seen it work on any paypal shop for around a year, so either it's broken and they don't care or maybe no one reads the docs?
[2] https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/account-optional https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/account-optional
- dhimes 10y agoI did it a couple of days back, so it still works. I have a paypal account for business, but not personal shopping. So I always use paypal simply as a payment processor for personal items.
- pietroalbini 10y agoAt least from Italy I'm still able to use PayPal without an account, FYI
- user5994461 10y agoSame from France and UK.
- JimDabell 10y ago> Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account > Paypals documentation[2] states this is still possible, but I haven't seen it work on any paypal shop for around a year, so either it's broken and they don't care or maybe no one reads the docs? From the last time I had to evaluate PayPal as an option, I seem to recall that they only allow people to make payments without an account a certain number of times. So if you have already made a payment through PayPal without a registered account a few times, you will be forced to create an account for any future payments. You've probably made enough payments that you've gone over the limit. I can't remember what the limit is, but I remember being surprised at how low it was.
- Negitivefrags 10y agoWe use use normal credit card processing through stripe and support paypal as well (as well as a few other options). 40% of payments are still made through paypal. How many of those customers would have aborted if we didn't support paypal? I don't know, but I'm sure it's a non-zero number.
- Kevin_S 10y agoI very recently bought a watch online from a private seller and paid through Paypal without an account. So this appears to still work?