How much of a deterrant is Paypal to Conversions

[Wendel]

I'm running a fairly successful website, thanks mostly in part to tricks I have learned here.
We are a service only storefront, but our sales are small ammounts(15-60 dollars per sale usually).
I'm trying to get a real credit card processor setup, but it's taking quite sometime. Currently we are just using paypal buttons to process our payments.
I was wondering if you had found that paypal would make people not follow through with their purchase.
Hopefully we can get our CC processing setup shortly, we are just waiting for merchant account numbers, or so beanstream says.

Thanks in advance.

[topguy29]

I think it really depends on your market and what you are selling. It sounds like though your average ticket is not that much so you are not selling high end electronics, etc so it should be OK.

I know that in the US, paypal offers an API, you might see if they offer it for Canadians as well

[pp_rb]

If you let customers know on your website that you are able to receive credit card payments, that should help avoid problems when they go to the PayPal site to make a payment. I'm assuming that you are using PayPal's Buy Now or Shopping Cart buttons, and have Account Optional available for your customers to pay without having a PayPal account.

Some customers might not know that PayPal allows credit card payment without an account, so it may help if you include some message about credit card payments on your website before they click the button to go to the PayPal site.

[Essex_boy]

I used mals cart and found that I had an abnormal level of abandonments when using Paypal only. One woman in Canada could even use paypal, switching to a crad processor saved me a bundle.

[pp_rb]

I'm not that familiar with Mal's standard PayPal integration, but I've definitely seen some carts that are designed primarily for credit card checkout and won't fare well when they are configured for PayPal only. For example, if the cart collects the customer's billing address as one of the first steps, the customer might assume that they will be paying by credit card within the cart, and then being transferred to the PayPal website might be a little confusing for them as a result. And since PayPal would only allow you to pre-fill the customer's shipping address, and not a billing address, the customer might get frustrated if they're paying by card and have to enter the same billing address multiple times. (I've seen carts that don't even successfully pass the shipping address to PayPal, which would cause even more frustration for the customer.) Also, if the cart's PayPal option doesn't make it clear to the customer that they can pay using a credit card without having a PayPal account, the customer might assume that an account is required and abandon before they even reach the PayPal website.

The bottom line is, your checkout has to make sense to the customer and set the correct expectations about their payment options. If you tell them up front "you can pay by credit card, and it will be processed by PayPal", that will be far better than using a shopping cart's standard "pay by PayPal" option that is probably designed to be used in addition to a "pay by credit card" option on the same cart page. And, because PayPal's credit card checkout collects all of the customer's billing information on the PayPal website, you'll create a better checkout if you eliminate any redundant checkout steps within your own site or cart.

[ichthyous]

I have used paypal for quite a while...people minded when they had to sign up for an acoount. But now Paypal doesn't force you to have a paypal account in order to checkout and that was a major improvement. I do relatively few, but high dollar value sales to very high end clients and nobody complains at all. In fact most of the time my clients just give me their credit card info and I run it through myself so they never see the Paypal process. Paypal is a very viable payment system, easy to use and MUCh cheaper (only 2.5% of each sale if you do more than $2,500/mos of business, or 3% for under 2.5K/mo.)...I made sure to be very specific on my checkout pages that the cutomer does not need a paypal account to checkout and that helped. My experience with the one other payment sytem I used (2checkout) was a nightmare. These days I find that many of people who buy have a Paypal account anyway.

[johnkwok]

i must agree that paypal is one of the best in the market, but i just wonder if all our payment will rely on paypal, we may get into trouble in one day like

1) system error in paypal
2) your account get suspend for no reason
3) you will not be sucess if you running a auction site(it is a ebay's company)

i think we should support more this kind of site to be stay in the market,only competition will made them do better, in result we will get better rate, service and secutity.

for example how nice to have *nix and we can install as many server we like.

i cannot sleep with a windows server!

agree?

[sniffer]

Over the past two weeks we have gone back to Paypal as the only payment option (temporarily). My observations:

- massive increase in cart abondonment
- 40% less orders
- huge decrease in total value of order

Mind you, this is without the suggested things like "You dont need an account to pay with Paypal" etc... but they just arent going to make up the difference

The only thing better is the paypal interface is easier to use than the CC payment gateway.. so basically you can do credits easier lol

[jrussell]

Agreed. There is a real market for competition, but costs are too high for sales under $5.

[drhfinegifts]

I was also using Paypal exclusively for about 6 months. I didn't use the Pro account or whatever it is called, so customers where redirected to the Paypal page to complete the purchase.

Well, I was have LOTS of abandoned carts & emails from people saying they didn't want to register with Paypal (even though it was noted clearly on my site that a Paypal account wasn't necessary!).

In March of this year I opened up a credit card processing account - Authorize.net. So now customers have the option to directly input their credit card info, pay by Paypal, or check/MO.

This dramatically increased my sales. Mind you, my typical order is from $50-$100 so it worth the fees.

Have you looked into the Paypal Pro account? Perhaps that would help you convert more sales.

Denise