Chris,
If you are starting small, then it is probably the best (sorry Tracy)
for a number of reasons.
It is very easy to set up. Much easier than getting a merchant account,
a payment processor/gateway, and setting up the software needed on your
site. Other than the administrative stuff at PayPal, it literally takes
a few minutes to get your site workign with PayPal... depending on the
type of checkout you are doing. I do PayPal subscriptions on our site
and it is ridiculously simple. It will be the same for donations or
single item purchases. Shopping carts will be a little more time
consuming, but still not as difficult as the "traditional" way.
It can cost less. Merchant Banks will charge you a monthly minimum
processing charge, a statement fee, a maintenance fee (maybe), etc.
Figure $30/mo to $40/mo. PayPal has no minimum and no fixed monthly
fees. If you begin to use it a lot, the price goes down, and you can
even get some of the processing fees back by using the PayPal debit card
to spend the money that came in through PayPal. I believe it is 1%. If
you spend the money with the debit card, the rate can't be beat. Even if
you do not and you process under a few grand a month then the $40/mo in
fees is a huge discount.
You do not have to worry about security. You have no liability for the
security of the card numbers and personal info.
Until you have established a reputation, some prospective customers may
not want to give you their info, so they will be ok with PayPal.
However:
Some people do not like PayPal for whatever reason. I am not saying
they are perfect, but some people have an aversion to PayPal, just as
some will be hesitant to let YOU handle their private info.
If you have a large number of customers, and they are subscription
customers where they get billed periodically, PayPal can sometimes
cancel their subscriptions if the customer attempts to update their
Credit Card or account info in the wrong way. This is the most
frustrating thing about PayPal subscriptions for me.
If a customer says "Add this to my account" you can not with PayPal.
They must complete a transaction on the web like their very first
purchase with you. With a
I think we began to outgrow PayPal at around 100 transactions per
month. At that time we began the search for a solution with everything
we wanted. We still offer PayPal as an option, but have set up a real
merchant solution for it's flexibility and tracking features. Now we are
doing about half on PayPal and half on a different solution specifically
designed for hosting business.
Good Luck,
Mike
On Mon, 2007-08-06 at 10:50 -0700, Christian Seberino wrote:
> I just looked at PayPal site and it appears setting up your web site
> to accept credit card payments is as easy as adding a "BUY" button
> that forwards visitors to PayPal URLs.
>
> Is this the best/easiest way to accept credit card orders?
>
>
> Chris
>
>
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