jecasc - 10:43 am on Nov 12, 2010 (gmt 0)

We have been offering Paypal besides several other payment options for six years now. At the beginning we had a lot of customers who had problems with paypal. Often they would switch to other payment options after trying Paypal because they could for some reason not complete their payment. However in the last two years the number of paypal payments have spiked to about 30% of our total sales and we rarely have any customers who had problems with completing their payment.

You should however be prepared that you might face the usual problems: A customer might dispute the payment or Paypal might withold a payment for investigation for some time. For us this happens lesser than one in a thousand payments, and usually it's sorted out after a few days. That a payment is disputed can happen with any merchant account however this is what freaks out many beginners. You have to keep your eyes open for fraudsters and if you feel that a sale is fraudulent you better refuse a sale once in a while and not let greed get the better of you. The Anti-Paypal forums are full of people who made their first sale to some obscure African Country and then start whining when the credit card turned out to be stolen.