Using Only Paypal

How many sales are we losing?

[mdean]

Hi all,

Currently, we only use Paypal for transactions. Can anyone give a rough idea of how much more sales we might have if we accepted credit cards as well? 2x's more, 3x's more....4 x's more?

Any help would be appreciated!

[ByronM]

100000 times

the reality is, there is no answer. If you market yourself to paypal customers you may drive enough traffic to support your efforts but if you want to reach the rest of the world (or those who have been bitten by paypal) it may be wise to get a full credit card processor.

Keep in mind paypal does offer merchant/credit card services so you can do both.

[ispy]

Does PayPal pay users for getting new signups?

[seanpecor]

I'm flirting with one million a year in revenue, funneled entirely through Paypal. I suspect there is a very small percentage of lost sales, but the reality is that you don't need a Paypal account to purchase through Paypal, so it's not the showstopper it was 5 years ago. Furthermore, you can integrate fully with Paypal on the back-end if you're concerned.

Cheers,

Sean

[HRoth]

seanpecor, is this using their Paypal Pro system or just plain Paypal?

[seanpecor]

Just plain Paypal. I have on my todo list a switch to Paypal Pro, but it's a low priority. The issue in my case is I have so far 17 resource sites and about 2,500 advertisers across those sites. I need to develop a unified payment processing system that will be able to integrate with all current and future properties (i.e., accept an order and then a purchase payment and then notify the appropriate site's backend of the order resolution). Otherwise I'll need to maintain dozens of SSL certs, which is not sensible.

I'm not a rabidly loyal Paypal vendor. If something better came along I'd certainly transition. I recently ordered some more custom dress shirts from my favorite online shirt vendor and I noted that they switched to the Google payment system. It was just like you would expect from Google; very fast and easy to use. If the % fee is equal to or smaller than Paypal's then I'll be switching soon.

Sean

[particleman]

I have a small ecommerce site me and a friend run on the side. In the interest of keeping cost down we did paypal standard payments on the site. We were careful to point out that you did not need a paypal account even though you went to their site during the last step in the payment process. After several months of operation it has been much more successful than I thought it would. I expected a fair amount of cart abandonment, we really don't have that.

[too much information]

I use PayPal with the option for the customer to mail a check, or call for credit card processing over the phone. I get maybe 1 check and 2 phone calls per year, everyone else goes through PayPal with no complaints.

[woop01]

We do the same thing with the mail in form and we do about 5% of our sales in that manner.

It's just my theory but I would assume that people who are wary of using Paypal are also less likely to use ANY form of online payment.

[Bjorn Iceland]

mdean,

Those merchants using PayPal alone (not Payments Pro) will see a 30-40% increase in sales (or even more) by taking credit cards the normal way in addition to PayPal.

PayPal know this and that's why they bought VeriSign's payment gateway and called it Payments Pro (although the fraud screening leaves something to be desired and is merchant hostile).

The launch of Payments Pro was PayPal's acknowledgement that the vanilla PayPal model gets in the way of the mainstream customer buying experience for the majority.

Unverified PayPal accounts (a considerable source of fraud for PayPal) continue to exist because only 150 millions of consumers have got PayPal accounts vs the reputed 1.5 billion credit cards in the US alone.

<rant>PayPal is great for eBay payments, but for online merchants it's a nightmare. It has uncontrollable chargeback risks (like Google Checkout), without the control of screening clients yourself you have with online credit cards. There's a reason PayPal doesn't insist on Verified accounts only. If they did their growth in new accounts would stop almost dead overnight.</rant>

While it's true that adding PayPal to a site that already accepts credit cards directly can increase your sales, you are most definately losing sales if you accept PayPal only.

[Mreif]

Hi,
I read an article recently that said that" merchants can convert as many as 20% more customersby offering more payment options to choose from". It's worth investing in more channels of payment.