Receiving payment via P$ypal etc

Please excuse my ignorance, I have no idea...

[Stefan]

I've been selling cartographical stuff via my website for a while, but in the past the business has been minor, so I've just done it by way of money orders in the mail and the odd wire transfer. Now, things are picking up and I need a better system.

For all you ecommerce people, I know this is a ridiculous question, but please take pity on me - what's the best, cheapest way to have online customers pay you easily, for total sales of under 10,000 USD/yr? I signed up for a p$ypal acct today - it looks like there's a 3% commision and that's it, but I'm still rather foggy on it. Most of the funds have to come from international to Canada. Will this method work, and if it's not the best, what is better?

Again, excuse the complete lack of knowledge on this, but I'm a speleologist trying to scrape up funding, not a businessman. If this post doesn't get answered, I'll just keep bumping it up every couple of days, so if you want to see the last of it, please offer advice ;-)

[shri]

Paypal does work for a lot people in that range ( US$<10K) and the added benefit would be it makes eBay sales a bit easier.

Not too sure what your specific issues are .. but ask, several members here use paypal extensively to send and receive payments.

[mack]

Paypal is actualy pretty good. There are two main ways you would be able to use it.

You can sent a bill in the form of an email. The users receives the email and clicks on a link to make the payment. When the payment goes through (usualy right away) the funds will appear in your paypal account.

The other method it to merge your paypal account to your wesite. You can use a web script to handle the entire transaction for you. User comes to your site, places an order. He/she is then sent to paypal to make payment. They are then returned to your site to complete the transaction.

You may want to do some searching on the topic of paypal ipn.

Mack.

[Raymond]

I have been using Paypal and a credit card processor for my site for 2.5 years. The good part about Paypal is it offers relatively easily intergratable solutions (IPN, Shopping cart, customizable form post) that you can incorporate into your ecommerce website.
The bad part is, Paypal offers very high protection for buyers, and very low protection for seller. Any customers can file a report for not receiving the items they purchased, and you can say good bye to the money. Your customers don't even have to deal with their bank, or credit card center, all they need is to email Paypal. You can appeal, but it never worked (at least for me, even with shipping proof, 5 times.) Paypal also have really ridiculously unreasonable exchange rate. You can count on getting ripped off another 3% of your sales (on top of the ~3% to 4% transaction charges) due to their exchange rate. This could be a major problem for sites that runs on low profit margin.

[pp_rb]

As a merchant, you would only need to deal with PayPal's exchange rate if you are accepting payments in one currency and then converting them to another currency after you receive them. For example, if you have a US account with a USD balance, but put payment options on your website for customers to pay you in Euros, then you would have to handle the exchange of Euros to USD if you wanted to transfer those funds into your balance or out to a US bank account.

However, if you only set up your payment options in a single currency, then you would not need to convert funds after a payment is complete. Instead, any customer wanting to pay using a different currency would have to convert that currency into your currency before sending the payment. So, if I sell one item on my website for 5 USD, every payment I receive for that item will have a Gross payment amount of 5 USD, regardless of how the customer funded it. The only thing that might differ on my side (as the merchant) would be the fee rate, if I am receiving both domestic and cross-border payments. (Refer to the Fee table on the website to see the relevant rates.)

[Stefan]

Many thanks, folks. That's a lot of great information. I kept thinking that there must be a monthly charge buried in the details somewhere, but it really is just the commision, eh?

However, if you only set up your payment options in a single currency, then you would not need to convert funds after a payment is complete. Instead, any customer wanting to pay using a different currency would have to convert that currency into your currency before sending the payment.

Great info, thanks. That being the case, I'll probably do all pricing in CDN$, because that's where my main expenses are. It's been very strong the last while, anyway, so I've been steadily getting less by quoting prices in USD - I guess I'll just leave it up to my hoped-for customers to check the exchange rate before they consider buying. Actually, I could just update the .htm with the approximate rates every few days - it would keep the pages fresh for the bots as well.

Thanks again, everyone - that was just what I needed to know.

[Tapolyai]

There is no reason you could still not post the various prices in other currencies with your product. There are several web sites that provide free conversion tools to almost all the currencies (such as xe dot com).

Just make sure you clearly indicate that all payments and S&H are calculated in $CDN, with a disclaimer that conversion rates are done by the appropriate banks and everyone will be delighted.

[Stefan]

Yes, good thought, Tapolyai. That site you mentioned is the one I ususally check for exchange rates.

Just make sure you clearly indicate that all payments and S&H are calculated in $CDN, with a disclaimer that conversion rates are done by the appropriate banks and everyone will be delighted.

Indeed, I'll have to make it quite clear. It might actually work to my advantage - people will see the price in CDN, then US or Euros, and think, "my, that's fairly cheap then" :-)

[pp_rb]

If a customer is purchasing from you using PayPal and needs to convert the currency, PayPal will show the exchange rate that will be used, as well as the total amount in both currencies.* This means that the customer should see the total amount that they will be charged before they finalize the payment. It also means that they might see an amount on PayPal that is different from what you quote them based on another currency converter, so you might want to be cautious there.

*There are a couple of exceptions:
1. The customer might select not to have the currency conversion performed by PayPal, in which case PayPal cannot quote the exact exchange rate that will be used when the charge is processed.
2. If you are using Express Checkout for your PayPal payments, PayPal can display the available exchange rate but will not display the total amounts, since you can adjust the total amount before finalizing the payment on your site.