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These horror stories are so common that I have to ask: why does anyone still use PayPal? I ask this in the most constructive way possible... is there a set of
by brianr 15y ago
These horror stories are so common that I have to ask: why does anyone still use PayPal?
I ask this in the most constructive way possible... is there a set of use-cases that PayPal is still the best for? Is it a lack of awareness of alternatives? International availability? Something else?
- bphogan 15y agoBecause buyers keep demanding sellers use it. If you're a buyer, it's about the most painless thing out there. I got forced into it by a client once for that very reason. Unfortunately PyPal froze his account with about $20k in it. We switched to a real merchant account and everything went uphill from there.
- DanI-S 15y agoIs there a current best alternative to PayPal that you would recommend?
- bphogan 15y agoI've used Authorize.net + a merchant account at a real bank a few times. It works, every time. BrainTree is awesome too. If you're doing subscriptions, http://spreedly.com/ http://spreedly.com/ is good. And Stripe looks cool but I've never used it. (https://stripe.com/ https://stripe.com/)
- dangrossman 15y agoTaking credit cards on your own site with a merchant account and gateway. But it'll almost definitely cost you more, you'll invest 10 times the resources into handling and stopping fraud, and some customers won't trust your site with their credit card. The reality is PayPal has a lot of benefits for both sides.
- alapshah 15y agoSamurai is really good http://samurai.feefighters.com http://samurai.feefighters.com priced similarly to paypal at 2.3% + 30 cents You really need a true merchant account plus gateway.
- DanI-S 15y agoThis looks seriously promising - I love that it doesn't require user sign-up. Their site is brilliantly designed, too.
- einhverfr 15y agoYou have two basic options: 1) A proper merchant gateway solution 2) A third party payment provider with better terms of service. On the first, I have generally recommended TrustCommerce both due to their emphasis on security (having reviewed their Perl and PHP API classes directly) and the richness of services they provide. They do cost more because Paypal gets a tremendous volume discount, but it's an option. For online payments also you have additional PCI-DSS worries that are burdensome for small businesses. The second option includes solutions like Amazon Payments. I currently use Amazon Payments because I process 4-5 transactions per year. At that volume it isn't worth maintaining my own merchant account and certainly is not worth worrying about PCI compliance......
- sp332 15y agoMainly international payments. Plus, customers are more likely to already have an account with them, and no one feels like signing up for a new payment system just to buy something at your store.
- brianr 15y agoI'd be curious to know how conversion rates vary when you have Paypal vs. a merchant account (or something like Stripe) vs. both. Anyone have any data?
- dangrossman 15y agoI have several websites; some sell products, some monthly subscriptions, some target consumers, some businesses. Universally, on all of these sites, customers choose to pay with PayPal more often than credit card. For the most part, my payment pages are a secure credit card form with a "or Pay with PayPal" button to the right of the form. More people choose to click through to PayPal than to just put their card in to the form already on screen. The preference for PayPal is larger outside the US among my customers.
- sk5t 15y agoHave you added Amazon payments as an option as well? I would choose that every time, given the choice, if for no other reason than Paypal is always trying to trick me into paying from my bank account, when I really want to pay with credit card for rewards and security. Amazon doesn't try to trick me.
- zem 15y agosame here - my preferred options are amazon, credit card and if there's no alternative and i really want whatever it is, paypal.
- james33 15y ago40% of my customers will only pay with PayPal. I went without PayPal for about a month at one point and sales were down dramatically even though I still had credit card and other options available.
- wdewind 15y agoBecause in reality paypal is actually pretty awesome (note: I work for Etsy which uses paypal as a payment processor, so I guess I'm kind of biased). The cost for the business, compared to maintaining your own payments platform at scale, is pretty reasonable, and the failure rate is pretty miniscule when you consider the amount of potential fraud that goes through the platform. Paypal wasn't really designed to handle one off personal payments, it was designed to let small (and large) businesses accept payments, internationally and fraud free. This is ridiculously difficult (how many of you have ever written software that integrates with a bank? ugh.) PayPal does this exceptionally well and because of that many huge businesses are built on its back. The reality is, in most of the situations that people complain about freezing their money, without paypal their entire project would've been a no-go anyway. I do feel for people who legitimately have their accounts wrongly frozen (I am one of them, though mine was unfrozen after a few days), but you have to understand how small a percentage of people that is, and that you can't have a system without failure. Again, paypal's failure rate, when you consider what they actually do, is astoundingly low. Edit: Just for absolute clarity - I work for Etsy and have zero affiliation with the blog from the OP, and it has zero affiliation with Etsy. Also these are my opinions not my employers etc.
- thomasgerbe 15y agoBecause it is what most sellers offer for transactions.
- dangrossman 15y ago> These horror stories are so common Don't take that for granted. PayPal has 232 million registered accounts, and many more unregistered buyers. Even if 99.99% of PayPal account holders were completely satisfied and never had any problem, that'd 0.01% would still be 23200 pissed off people. Is it right to wonder "does anyone still use PayPal" if 99.99% of PayPal users have no problem using the service?
- ubernostrum 15y agoThe problem with PayPal, and the reason why these horror stories exist at all, is simple: the entirety of PayPal's dispute-resolution system seems to consist of "the system flagged it, tough luck". And the only way to get actual service from PayPal past that point is to raise a massive cry of bad PR for them online. So, yeah: if they don't want to deal with their customers, we can fix that by encouraging a situation in which they have no customers to deal with.
- simoncpu 15y agoThere is no good alternative. Existing alternatives require additional user signup, and the fees are the same. The Internet needs a good Paypal competitor.
- hokua 15y agoIm guessing this rant was submitted and upvoted by the developers of Stripe. Paypal works.
- ugh 15y agoBecause – as a buyer – PayPal is quite awesome.