Hi all,<p>I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems as though there are a lot of people out there who would prefer to use PayPal to pay for things online, either due to lack of a credit card, or because they already have a PayPal balance from selling things online, or even just because they feel PayPal is secure and/or familiar.<p>I've searched the 37signals' website and blog for a reason, but didn't find anything, and it seems like others are taking the same approach.<p>Can anyone shine any light on this?<p>Thank you.
I accept a fairly high volume of payments and intentionally don't accept Paypal. Here's why:<p>1. 99.9% of my paying customers have a credit card <---this is #1 for a reason<p>2. I've only had ~3 customers ever complain about my lack of Paypal. I made a special arrangement for 1. She ended up canceling.<p>3. Paypal doesn't allow the custom flows (upsells, cross-sells) that I can do with my shopping cart<p>4. Paypal doesn't integrate as nicely with my backend analytics, and I prefer to have all my sales centralized<p>5. Hearing bad bad horror stories about Paypal is just another, distant reason why I feel no urge to use them<p>Hope this helps.
I frequently look for a PayPal button / logo because I'm lazy. My card details are saved with PayPal and it's easier to enter my email address and password, then click confirm than to get my card out of my wallet and type the details in manually.<p>As a consumer, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the end cost (most of the time, unless the merchant charges a PayPal Premium) and saves me time.<p>It's the same reason I buy most of my music from iTunes and pretty much everything else from Amazon.
I recently stated this in another comment regarding payment systems.. I wouldn't rely on just one. A merchant account through a bank CAN get suspended or put on hold if you trip any risk ratios (e.g. inquiries, chargebacks, refunds). So, indeed, PayPal does have its share of stories of accounts being suspended without explicit reason; however, merchant banks have the same power and believe me when I say that they can lock/suspend your account, and hold your funds for 6 months without ANY detailed explanation and without interest.<p>Secondly, PayPal does have a new API called PayPal Adaptive Payments. It's very flexible.. pre-approved payments, distributed payments (refunds also mapped backwards), chained payments (multiple source accounts for making payment). Full details on their API PDF docs (easy to understand):<p><a href="https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/PP_AdaptivePayments.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/...</a><p>So, even if you don't feel all warm and fuzzy about PayPal.. you should have an account handy, and think about having it as a payment option on your site. Some users swear by it because they don't have to share any sensitive credit card information (including CVV coddes) with the merchant.
probably because of the fact that paypal is an unreliable source on which to build a business once it becomes big enough.<p>there are too many horror stories.
Well, i think 37Signals, YardEngine and GitHub uses BrainTree instead of Paypal, and IMO BrainTree is the best solution. I was helping the guys of <a href="http://rega.la" rel="nofollow">http://rega.la</a> to build the online payment part and i noted that for Credit Card payment is so cool.
Other way you can use is BOKU(<a href="http://www.boku.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.boku.com/</a>) which uses mobile carriers to make the money transaction in 3 simple steps.
I'd add Paypal support to GitHub if Braintree integrated it with their system so I wouldn't have to interface with Paypal directly. Too many horror stories.