Okay, I know its been discussed many a time, but I would like to see a poll to the question of Credibilty because you offer Paypal on your site. We disabled Paypal more than a year ago, and now we are being approched by Paypal to offer it again. We are getting the Sales Pitch that the Paypal brand is recognizable and that people trust Paypal.

If you have any comments or ideas on this please don't hesitate to offer them, but be sure to post your vote in the poll.

We use it because we had so many requests to use it. And it's convenient for a lot of people. Personally, I have a PPal CC to go with my account, so I could care less whether a merchant takes PPal or not. But the e-store takes them on a daily basis.

We get a lot of paypal orders so we continue to offer it. We will only ship to confirmed addresses though. I don;'t know about "adding credibility" but I like giving our customers many choices to pay. If they are uncomfortable giving out their credit card information to every emerchant out there, they may be willing to only pay through paypal.

Rick, I think it may make you more credible. A lot of people know paypal. But from some of the horror stories I have seen people post in the past. And the loops you have to jump through if there is a problem. We have yet to use it on our current site. I do agree with Danilyn about offering choices though. If you look at companies like tigerdirect.com they use about every payment option available and they are huge.

Less. Makes you look small time. Like you can't get a real payment processor. Pay Pal is for ebay auctions where it does work and fit in.
My 2 cents
Steve

i agree with you Steve, but only if paypal was your only option...

Godaddy even has paypal as one of their payment methods.

We don't use them because of the horror stories they have been known for. Heck i've even won some paypal disputes from ebay auctions when I know I really shouldn't have won... they always side with the buyer, never the seller/merchant - plain and simple

Rick,

I would think that if you offer paypal along with your normal credit card choice, you can't do any harm, only increase business by offering customers one more way to pay.

Along the same lines, Does anyone offer eChecks?
Steve

Thanks for posting guys.

Even though I believed like Deere about seeming smaller by putting paypal on the site, we offered it so that we could offer a choice. The fact that MC cart didn't agree with Paypal Standard on half the orders, that is, half of the orders would be incomplete but the cart would send the customer an email stating that they had paid for the order which led to phone calls and confusion. Costing us $$ and making us look real small. So we thought we would try out Paypal Express, which at the time cost $20 a month, this ended up putting a huge paypal button on the checkout page which made us look even smaller.

Then up comes along Google Checkout, now we were offering too many choices, the checkout process was complicated, which checkout method do I choose? We decided to can paypal and see what happened. Conversions went up without Paypal, and in 9 monhts one person has asked us, "Do you accept Paypal" when we told them no, they paid for the order via another method.

We like to be open, but one person in almost year asking for Paypal. Now in the last week, we get Paypal barking up our tree, "Why do you not offer paypal? We can offer you 1.9 percent on transactions. Read this case study, how paypal has helped this company look credible and there sales rose 10 percent" blah blah blah

I don't buy it, let me find out what our fellow MC merchants know about this.

Anyone else, don't hesitate to vote in the pole and add to this topic.

I totaly side with Steve,

We use PayPal on eBay but I would not dare offering it on our site, the other question that you have to ask yourself is; with the limited hours that one has in a day where would you like to allocate your time?

The big guys have a "PayPal" department, I do not know if you are aware of the fact that in the eye of the IRS the paypal account is considered a BANK ACCOUNT that means that on a given day you cannot take a closed batch and enter it as "ONE INCOME ENTRY"

You have to reconcile your PayPal statement the same way you reconcile your bank statement and to make things even more complicated PayPal deduct the fee from every transaction seperatly and if this was not enough when you download your statement into a spread sheet not all the lines affect the balance sheet so unless you create a filter to filter entries that not affect the balance sheet....... Good Luck reconciliating this account, for me it became a nightmare, I have better things to do with my time for example...adding another product or perfecting the HTML ON THE SITE.

By the way we NEVER had a problem with PayPal and ChargeBacks!

I vote NO to PayPal

Nuriel

Nuriel,

This is a good point, it is an all day event to reconcile Paypal, .06 here, .03 there, or yeah they paid you back .26 here in cashbank, and by the way don't forget the 3.12 they pay for the dividend. IT IS A NITEMARE on the reconcile thing. I have had to train two different people in the past to figure this account out and they still don't get it, it always ends up on my lap to figure out there fancy .06 fees.

Maybe someone who uses payments pro can tell us that they actually deduct the fees lump sum once a month and things are better in that program.

i am a new merchant but as a customer when i go to a site with paypay i autumatically think they are small time. i HATE using paypal pro as my payment option but my sales are low so its sorta my only choice as far as i know. That big orange PAY PAL button ruins my checkout i think. I have about a 98% abandoned cart rate. I think thats the main why people leave b4 paying. as for alternatives... im not sure how google check out works because there is almost no info about houw it work on their site. not to mention it doesnt seem to be very popular in this forum.

I am a victim of Paypal stealing my money.

They took $1500 from me and locked our account that was 7 years old

They stated that paypal doesn't want to do business with us anymore and will not give me any more information on why that locked our account.

I never had any chargebacks and only had 3 complaints on 1600 transactions, which all complaints I fixed myself and never was escalated to be handle by paypal.

They are holding our money for 6 months and from what I heard from others . That money is pretty much gone.

Right now I am in a midst of legal bs with them.

Paypal is the WORST company I ever dealt with. Great for average joe, but horrible for businesses.

I actually had a great experience with PP, but they dropped my account because I sell items that conflicts with their policies... They locked my account until I removed all signs and payment buttons for paypal. Now my account is fine and I still keep it for paying. I do not think it makes a business look "more credible". If anything I agree that it cheapens your business...

I am going to take the complete opposite side here. When I see a site that takes PayPal I perceive them to be more credible and consider them a serious business. With so many people transacting on eBay almost everyone has a PayPal account - why not let them use it on our site. One cannot argue with the success of many eBay stores.

I don't have any statistics regarding conversions, but since the very first day I put PayPal on our site we get about 3 to 5 people per day using that option. I like it and it's here to stay with us.

I am considering eCheck, too. I haven't yet decided on that one.

I offer PP on our site in addition to major credit cards for those people that prefer to use PP for transactions.

I think if you only offer PP you are perceived as a less credible business but offering it along with a standard CC processor nullifies that.

We offer PayPal and do quite a bit of business on it. I am always nervous about the PP horror stories.

We sell race car supplies tailored to a few types of ametuer racing. Many of our items are relatively inexpensive, and I think we sell more by offering PP becuase IMO many people use PP as a "hobby savings account" or perhaps they might keep the PP account to avoid questions from the spouse.

A second bonus, we use the Paypal Debit card quite often to pay vendors and you get 1% cash back immediately on that.

DaveW

I have a bank of america card that I get 1% cash back and received 25 grand for a loan with no interest for one year. You should check that out.

I charge a 3% fee for accepting paypal, for those ebay cultists that love to use it.