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I own an e-commerce business. We offer PayPal and credit card checkout - 75% of users choose PayPal. When we buy a lot of our products to sell, we get lots of t

I own an e-commerce business. We offer PayPal and credit card checkout - 75% of users choose PayPal. When we buy a lot of our products to sell, we get lots of them from small businesses in lots of different locations, many of them also offer PayPal to us (even on wholesales transactions), because it gives some level of comfort with international transactions. Because we often have cash in our PayPal account and it’s cheaper than paying our bank to send internationally, we often pick PayPal. So PayPal get a cut of the wholesale price and a cut of the sales price, on literally the same goods. Some of our customers create their own products from our products and use PayPal to sell them on again, making it a 3x cut for PayPal. Being a payment processor and solving that last click purchase problem / apps store is incredibly lucrative.

pbourke 6y ago
I help out with my wife’s online shop and have noticed the same thing. Personally, if I don’t see an obvious co-branding for Stripe or another trusted service I will usually pick PayPal over a naked credit card field. Who knows what the heck is going on in the backend. People are still doing stupid shit like storing untokenized cards in 2020. Edit: talking about smaller merchants in case it wasn’t clear.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  I’ll choose the naked credit card field to give the merchant more money since I’m not responsible for any fraudulent charges either. I know it costs me time and money to have to dispute charges, but I’ve never had to in 15 years of card usage, and the couple times my card number was attempted, the bank’s system had already flagged the transaction for me and asked me to verify. Basically, I see no value in PayPal to be in a credit card transaction. However, I wouldn’t do the same for an ACH/debit card transaction.
- donmcronald 6y ago
  Aren’t the fees for foreign exchange rates brutal with PayPal? Why not just get a couple prepaid credit cards and use those? The only way I can see the benefit of PayPal is if you have it linked to a credit card that you use like a short term 0% interest loan.

pbourke 6y ago

I help out with my wife’s online shop and have noticed the same thing. Personally, if I don’t see an obvious co-branding for Stripe or another trusted service I will usually pick PayPal over a naked credit card field. Who knows what the heck is going on in the backend. People are still doing stupid shit like storing untokenized cards in 2020. Edit: talking about smaller merchants in case it wasn’t clear.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
I’ll choose the naked credit card field to give the merchant more money since I’m not responsible for any fraudulent charges either. I know it costs me time and money to have to dispute charges, but I’ve never had to in 15 years of card usage, and the couple times my card number was attempted, the bank’s system had already flagged the transaction for me and asked me to verify. Basically, I see no value in PayPal to be in a credit card transaction. However, I wouldn’t do the same for an ACH/debit card transaction.
donmcronald 6y ago
Aren’t the fees for foreign exchange rates brutal with PayPal? Why not just get a couple prepaid credit cards and use those? The only way I can see the benefit of PayPal is if you have it linked to a credit card that you use like a short term 0% interest loan.