If you were buying a $1000 item online.

Would you use paypal?

[akmac]

If you were purchasing an expensive luxury item ($1000+ USD) online, would you:

A. Expect to see paypal as a payment option.
B. Expect to pay with your regular CC on the site.
C. Be pleasantly surprised to see paypal as a payment option-and use it.
D. Be shocked to see paypal as an option and abandon your cart.

I'm contemplating adding paypal as a payment option after 9 years of just using our merchant account. Anyone see the 14.1% increase in sales the cold caller I just talked to quoted?

[ergophobe]

Not quite. I make sales in the $440 to $800 range every day via Paypal, offering no other online option though, so not quite the same situation. I don't make many $1000 sales, but I have had a couple via Paypal.

Customers can call me and give me a credit card, but almost never do. They just do Paypal.

The one thing I hate about PP is that when a customer goes there, the whole funnel is designed to get them to sign up, not to make it easy for them to pay with their CC without signing up.

Problems/questions in the last month or two as a result of this confusion:

1. I don't have enough in my paypal account to pay this. I'm going to have to call you and give you a card over the phone? (seriously)

2. I don't have a Paypal account. Is there any way I can just give you a credit card? (seriously)

3. You sent the invoice to [e-mail] but my paypal account is [e-mail]. Can you send me a new invoice? (seriously)

Of course, in your case, PP will be one option among many, so presumably you won't have the problem of people who are clueless about Paypal.

[HRoth]

I started with Paypal instead of a credit card processor, so I don't know about the increase in sales, but I would not be surprised at that increase. Lots of people like Paypal because you don't have to re-enter your cc info AND because Paypal acts as a mediator in a very direct way when an interaction with a merchant goes wrong. Recently I bought some jewelry from an importer, and the only reason why I went through with the order was because I saw they had Paypal as a choice, which I used. I have found that countless companies are able to repeatedly thieve from people, not send products, send inferior or incorrect products, never answer the phone or emails, and so forth with a regular credit card processor and never lose their ability to process cards, but those shenanigans don't seem to survive long with Paypal.

Fears about identity theft have been so whipped up that this is also in Paypal's favor--although IME, my Paypal debit card has been compromised much more often than my bank cards. Could be what I use it for, though--more likely to use that one in meatspace.

It also seems to me that more merchants are carrying Paypal as well as regular cc processing. I would not be shocked to see Paypal as an option, and I have been surprised to see it on some sites but not in a bad way.

I sound like a Paypal cheerleader, but I am not by any means. I really hate some of the things they do, but they are convenient and my customers like them. They provide about 40% of my business. However, I am not selling $1000 items.

[dpd1]

PayPal is by no means perfect, but I think it's a lot better than it's reputation. And I think that reputation has slowly gotten better, at least as far as consumers are concerned. It probably all depends on who you are dealing with. I've found that most average individuals have no problem with it, even when it's a large amount or international. In fact, international people actually like it. But old school biz to biz or gov type people? Not so much. They're used to doing things the old fashioned way. But I think that is slowly changing as younger people come in.

[mattb]

We added Paypal in the last year. Prior to that we took credit cards both on the web and over the phone. We routinely sell items between $6 and $5000. While we now process more Paypal orders than Discover Card it is by no means the preferred method of payment for high ticket items. A quick glance of 30 orders all above $700 showed no Paypal payments. I can't speak to the 14.1% increase in sales as our business has grown otherwise so it would be difficult to quantify.

[digitalv]

As a buyer when given the choice between PayPal and Credit Card I almost always pay with PayPal. I know there will never be any extra dollars tacked on beyond what I agree to pay, never any accidental double charges, never any repeat charges later, and if someone hacks their database they won't get anything useful on me.

As a merchant I always accept both. My experience has been that many people seem to regard the money in their PayPal account as "extra money" and are more inclined to buy an item that's outside of their normal budget if all or most of the cost of the item is in their PayPal account already.

[akmac]

Thanks for the replies so far. I understand why power users of paypal may find it more convenient because of familiarity.

However, I don't think anyone has ever abandoned their purchase on our site because we didn't offer it as a payment method-so I doubt I'd see a sales increase.

That said, it would be pretty easy to implement as an option during checkout-even if only to test it out...