5 ms·

I don't understand why I need anything more than Paypal? Everybody else seems to just charge more and I don't see what you get for that. Isn't credit card pro

by nissimk 16y ago

I don't understand why I need anything more than Paypal? Everybody else seems to just charge more and I don't see what you get for that. Isn't credit card processing online a commodity and using the least expensive solution the way to go?

bdickason 16y ago
Perhaps it's just a question of scale, and maybe I'm trying to solve problems that don't really exist. I'm hesitent to use paypal because when I _DO_ move to something more legit (ala Braintree or Authorize.net), I have to re-bill all of my customers and they have to put in their CC info again. This doesn't seem ideal to me.
- SwellJoe 16y ago
  We moved from Authorize.net to PayPal Web Payments Pro. Much happier now. Braintree was outrageously expensive when I looked at it, so I didn't even consider it.
  - dan_manges 16y ago
    Our (Braintree) fees are competitive. We have a higher monthly minimum than some, if that's what you're referencing, but otherwise if a merchant is processing a few thousand dollars a month our fees are right in line. We are different than others in the industry. We engage in a meaningful way with our customers. We educate them on the risks, nuances and best practices. We try to properly assess risk upfront instead of surprising afterwards. We proactively help them lower fees. We assist with PCI Compliance and credit card data security. We don't hold stored credit card data hostage. We don't hide fees and then deny that we hid them in the first place. We answer our phones and respond to email very quickly. Our goal always been for our customers to conclude that we're the best payments provider they've ever worked with and many of our customers maintain that opinion which we're always very pleased to hear.
    - SwellJoe 16y ago
      Your fees look much lower than last I looked (I also seem to recall I had to contact someone at Braintree to get rates last time I was shopping...I don't think it was prominent on the website as it is now). Anyway, I take it back, Braintree does appear to be competitive with PayPal Payments Pro and others.
    - jhancock 16y ago
      Braintree does even out on fees once the merchant hits a few thousand dollars a month in transactions. After grueling research, I wanted to use Braintree for a number of reasons, many of which you've pointed out. But the thing I am bootstrapping may take 6-24 months to get to the point where the Braintree minimums aren't putting me in the red. My calculations showed I might have had $3,000 to $5,000 in fees stacked up with Braintree before my volume caught up. A Braintree salesman did try to work with me and agree to reduce _some_ of the fees for the first 3 months, but the numbers still didn't work out Its a startup, I have no idea when Google will decide I'm worthy of being indexed. I have no idea how many experiments I have to run before I hit a sweet spot. So I begrudgingly went with PayPal Standard. Now, I have a few subscribers and I'm going to upgrade to PayPal Pro since that's only $29 a month fee, which is better than most. I have to roll the dice and hope I get the service I need from PayPal if it comes to it.
      - percept 16y ago
        I'm not there yet but came to the same conclusion. There's a need startups have that only PayPal seems to fill (unfortunately). I see FastSpring responded in this thread that recurring billing is coming, so maybe that will become a viable option: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413905
    - jmm 16y ago
      I can see why Braintree would have no interest in businesses that are destined to maintain smallness, but they're missing out on getting into bed with some young companies whose payment volume will eventually pop. And leaving the door open for a more nurturing payment portal to grab young companies (and presumably keep them). So it might be wise to for Braintree to loosen up the fees a bit for promising young companies - an incubator program for payments of sorts. At least for the YC/HN community :) Though, honestly, looking at their pricing, Braintree ins't crazy expensive even for a company that gets $0 sales out of the gate... $99 initial setup, $35 monthly, $10 for cc storage, $75 as a zero sales "penalty". Setup delay seems to be an issue here as well, but that just seems like Braintree doing its diligence. http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing
pdx 16y ago
I'm gradually leaning toward your way of thinking. For a long time, I had the perception, which, I believe, was the correct one, that PayPal == Amateur in the minds of your potential customers. I believe that this is no longer the case. Well, it is the case, but it no longer matters. I still think "small time", when I see a PayPal button, but now I also think "trusted" and "easy refund". These tend to make the "small time" thought less of an issue. I also think that it's gradually losing it's "small time", "amateur" connotations among savvy web users. For non-savvy web users, which in reality, is the larger population, it never mattered anyway, and I agonized over all of this for nothing.
- justinchen 16y ago
  I went through the same thought process. The way I see it, if you're a big enough name to be reputable, then you should definitely handle payment yourself, but if you're still trying to get traction and a reputation, leveraging PayPay's reasonably trusted record is a good way to go. For quite awhile both wordpress.com and stumblupon both were using paypal as their payment method for buying credits.
SwellJoe 16y ago
At low volume, PayPal Payments Pro is as good as anything I've found, and it is cheaper than almost every other merchant services provider (especially by the time you factor in the gateway fees). But, it's definitely not cheap. I ache every time I see how much of our revenue is going to PayPal, even if it's better than the prior provider we were using. Our prior merchant services provider had cranked up rates gradually from the time we signed up, and always found reasons to charge us the highest tier of pricing (higher risk transactions got the higher rate, and it seemed like 90% of our orders qualified as "high risk" according to their metrics, even though at the time we were only dealing with about one chargeback per month). When we signed up a few years ago it was dramatically cheaper than PayPal, but by the time we switched it was almost a couple of points more expensive. But PayPal is also not particularly great. The UI is agonizingly slow (I can only imagine how painful it would be to use if we were doing thousands or millions of transactions per month instead of hundreds). Their response time on payment processing is also slow...slow enough to confuse our shop sometimes. The good things about PayPal are its better fraud management tools (which you have to pay extra for), its pervasive support in shopping carts (though Payments Pro is a little more rare), and its really comprehensive online interface. I used to have to send faxes for everything with the old processor, which was just ridiculous. I can do anything online with PayPal. I also love that PayPal does everything. I hated never even knowing who to call when we had problems with the old service. There were three web interfaces for three different companies (Authorize.net, merchant services bank, and some sort of reporting service that I never could figure out) that did god knows what, and we were being billed by all of them. All of them had different points of contact and different procedures for dealing with issues (and issues pretty much never got dealt with), and I never, in years of dealing with them, figured out who was responsible for what. PayPal is the gateway, the merchant services provider, and everything else. When I'm confused about something, or need to issue a refund or whatever, I login to one place and all the data is there. I also haven't been able to figure out how to use recurring payments at PayPal. But, that's probably a failing on my part. I'm kinda dumb sometimes, when accounting and money and such comes up. But, I definitely don't think PayPal is the last word in payment processing. If there were something better, faster, or cheaper, I'd happily switch (any one of those three things would do it, assuming it's equal on the others). It's a really hard market to tackle, since so much of it is regulatory compliance (both private and government regulations) and interacting with really old-fashioned industries (banks modernized about 30 years ago, and seemingly decided that was a one-time expense that they never needed to do again).
proexploit 16y ago
The least expensive solution is not always the best. I formerly used Paypal exclusively, now I lose out on some work because I refuse to use it. They can lock your account at any time for any reason. It's nearly impossible to get support and it doesn't matter. Paypal is easy to game in that a buyer can use a credit card, and initiate a charge-back. Paypal sides with a charge-back 100% of the time that you can't prove shipment which of course is impossible with digital goods. I've had my account locked down for 6 months in the past for attempting to use some of my funds to buy actual physical gold as an investment. No fraud anywhere, but they decided that's money laundering. I am happy to see a new start-up come through and try and change something because Paypal is broken.

by nissimk 16y ago

bdickason 16y ago

Perhaps it's just a question of scale, and maybe I'm trying to solve problems that don't really exist. I'm hesitent to use paypal because when I _DO_ move to something more legit (ala Braintree or Authorize.net), I have to re-bill all of my customers and they have to put in their CC info again. This doesn't seem ideal to me.

SwellJoe 16y ago
We moved from Authorize.net to PayPal Web Payments Pro. Much happier now. Braintree was outrageously expensive when I looked at it, so I didn't even consider it.
- dan_manges 16y ago
  Our (Braintree) fees are competitive. We have a higher monthly minimum than some, if that's what you're referencing, but otherwise if a merchant is processing a few thousand dollars a month our fees are right in line. We are different than others in the industry. We engage in a meaningful way with our customers. We educate them on the risks, nuances and best practices. We try to properly assess risk upfront instead of surprising afterwards. We proactively help them lower fees. We assist with PCI Compliance and credit card data security. We don't hold stored credit card data hostage. We don't hide fees and then deny that we hid them in the first place. We answer our phones and respond to email very quickly. Our goal always been for our customers to conclude that we're the best payments provider they've ever worked with and many of our customers maintain that opinion which we're always very pleased to hear.
  - SwellJoe 16y ago
    Your fees look much lower than last I looked (I also seem to recall I had to contact someone at Braintree to get rates last time I was shopping...I don't think it was prominent on the website as it is now). Anyway, I take it back, Braintree does appear to be competitive with PayPal Payments Pro and others.
  - jhancock 16y ago
    Braintree does even out on fees once the merchant hits a few thousand dollars a month in transactions. After grueling research, I wanted to use Braintree for a number of reasons, many of which you've pointed out. But the thing I am bootstrapping may take 6-24 months to get to the point where the Braintree minimums aren't putting me in the red. My calculations showed I might have had $3,000 to $5,000 in fees stacked up with Braintree before my volume caught up. A Braintree salesman did try to work with me and agree to reduce _some_ of the fees for the first 3 months, but the numbers still didn't work out Its a startup, I have no idea when Google will decide I'm worthy of being indexed. I have no idea how many experiments I have to run before I hit a sweet spot. So I begrudgingly went with PayPal Standard. Now, I have a few subscribers and I'm going to upgrade to PayPal Pro since that's only $29 a month fee, which is better than most. I have to roll the dice and hope I get the service I need from PayPal if it comes to it.
    - percept 16y ago
      I'm not there yet but came to the same conclusion. There's a need startups have that only PayPal seems to fill (unfortunately). I see FastSpring responded in this thread that recurring billing is coming, so maybe that will become a viable option: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413905 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1413905
  - jmm 16y ago
    I can see why Braintree would have no interest in businesses that are destined to maintain smallness, but they're missing out on getting into bed with some young companies whose payment volume will eventually pop. And leaving the door open for a more nurturing payment portal to grab young companies (and presumably keep them). So it might be wise to for Braintree to loosen up the fees a bit for promising young companies - an incubator program for payments of sorts. At least for the YC/HN community :) Though, honestly, looking at their pricing, Braintree ins't crazy expensive even for a company that gets $0 sales out of the gate... $99 initial setup, $35 monthly, $10 for cc storage, $75 as a zero sales "penalty". Setup delay seems to be an issue here as well, but that just seems like Braintree doing its diligence. http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/pricing

pdx 16y ago

I'm gradually leaning toward your way of thinking. For a long time, I had the perception, which, I believe, was the correct one, that PayPal == Amateur in the minds of your potential customers. I believe that this is no longer the case. Well, it is the case, but it no longer matters. I still think "small time", when I see a PayPal button, but now I also think "trusted" and "easy refund". These tend to make the "small time" thought less of an issue. I also think that it's gradually losing it's "small time", "amateur" connotations among savvy web users. For non-savvy web users, which in reality, is the larger population, it never mattered anyway, and I agonized over all of this for nothing.

justinchen 16y ago
I went through the same thought process. The way I see it, if you're a big enough name to be reputable, then you should definitely handle payment yourself, but if you're still trying to get traction and a reputation, leveraging PayPay's reasonably trusted record is a good way to go. For quite awhile both wordpress.com and stumblupon both were using paypal as their payment method for buying credits.

SwellJoe 16y ago

At low volume, PayPal Payments Pro is as good as anything I've found, and it is cheaper than almost every other merchant services provider (especially by the time you factor in the gateway fees). But, it's definitely not cheap. I ache every time I see how much of our revenue is going to PayPal, even if it's better than the prior provider we were using. Our prior merchant services provider had cranked up rates gradually from the time we signed up, and always found reasons to charge us the highest tier of pricing (higher risk transactions got the higher rate, and it seemed like 90% of our orders qualified as "high risk" according to their metrics, even though at the time we were only dealing with about one chargeback per month). When we signed up a few years ago it was dramatically cheaper than PayPal, but by the time we switched it was almost a couple of points more expensive. But PayPal is also not particularly great. The UI is agonizingly slow (I can only imagine how painful it would be to use if we were doing thousands or millions of transactions per month instead of hundreds). Their response time on payment processing is also slow...slow enough to confuse our shop sometimes. The good things about PayPal are its better fraud management tools (which you have to pay extra for), its pervasive support in shopping carts (though Payments Pro is a little more rare), and its really comprehensive online interface. I used to have to send faxes for everything with the old processor, which was just ridiculous. I can do anything online with PayPal. I also love that PayPal does everything. I hated never even knowing who to call when we had problems with the old service. There were three web interfaces for three different companies (Authorize.net, merchant services bank, and some sort of reporting service that I never could figure out) that did god knows what, and we were being billed by all of them. All of them had different points of contact and different procedures for dealing with issues (and issues pretty much never got dealt with), and I never, in years of dealing with them, figured out who was responsible for what. PayPal is the gateway, the merchant services provider, and everything else. When I'm confused about something, or need to issue a refund or whatever, I login to one place and all the data is there. I also haven't been able to figure out how to use recurring payments at PayPal. But, that's probably a failing on my part. I'm kinda dumb sometimes, when accounting and money and such comes up. But, I definitely don't think PayPal is the last word in payment processing. If there were something better, faster, or cheaper, I'd happily switch (any one of those three things would do it, assuming it's equal on the others). It's a really hard market to tackle, since so much of it is regulatory compliance (both private and government regulations) and interacting with really old-fashioned industries (banks modernized about 30 years ago, and seemingly decided that was a one-time expense that they never needed to do again).

proexploit 16y ago

The least expensive solution is not always the best. I formerly used Paypal exclusively, now I lose out on some work because I refuse to use it. They can lock your account at any time for any reason. It's nearly impossible to get support and it doesn't matter. Paypal is easy to game in that a buyer can use a credit card, and initiate a charge-back. Paypal sides with a charge-back 100% of the time that you can't prove shipment which of course is impossible with digital goods. I've had my account locked down for 6 months in the past for attempting to use some of my funds to buy actual physical gold as an investment. No fraud anywhere, but they decided that's money laundering. I am happy to see a new start-up come through and try and change something because Paypal is broken.