I'm looking for a better and cheaper solution to our current method for accepting credit card payments. I'm checked out a lot of popular places and PayPal seems to be not only the cheapest but pretty well featured too. Is there a reason not to use their Pro solution? Is there someone cheaper and better out there that I'm missing?
The number one reason for not using PayPal is that you can't depend on or trust them. You could go for years ... pass hundreds of thousands of dollars through them without a single problem or conflict ... then suddenly they decide that you've done something wrong, and they close your account with no chance of appeal.
Do I sound bitter? It's because I am - this exact thing happened to me, and I was not impressed. Not impressed at all.
I guess, yeah. I can only speak from personal experience.
However if you went for a solution that was backed by a financial institute with a longer and more reputatable track record - such as your bank - one would hope that there would be greater transparency and accountibility.
Paypal does have a bad rep for freezing funds willy nilly. Hasn't happened to me yet but it has happened to a disproportionate number of people vs other merchant service providers.
PayPal has terrible documentation. When checking out others I though paypal was great because the had lots of docs, but once I started implementing it I found out that it may be a lot but its mostly useless. They have 4 different docs for the same thing and 18 different ways to do the same thing. Thier example's were poorly written and most were contributions from people outside of the company. I'm using Payflow Gateway, because I already had a merchant account.
Best practice suggests having two methods of payment. If one falls you can fall back to the next one while you seek a replacement. Paypal is very popular with shoppers so not having it, especially with smaller businesses, you can miss out on a lot of sales - one site I added Paypal to gained a 25% increase in daily sales overnight.
If Paypal fits in with your business plan then use it. Yes some people have had problems with Paypal freezing their accounts and so on, some of these will have broken their TOS, others who knows. Let's face it, any payment processor can suspend your account without notice.
I think you might notice more complaints because it's user base is huge, but proportionally wise it might not get more complaints than any other processor.
Interesting post as I am in the middle of integrating PayPal Pro (UK). Although I am experiencing problems with the API I am struggling through...
For UK merchants what other alternatives are there for processing payments within your website (e.g. using API's to send, validate and charge payments) ?
I looked at Google Checkout, this is nice and very easy to integrate but requires shoppers to sign up for a google account - are shoppers happy to do that? I myself would like the option...
I would be more than happy (so far) with PayPal Pro IF the API for UK merchants was a little more straight forward, but issues of account suspension is a little worrying... surely this must be due to breaking of TOS?
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