Paypal Sales Only

How much business am I losing out on?

[wiskur]

I have a small e-commerce site that I do on the side when I'm not at my "real" job.
Since I don't want to invest a lot of money, for the last year or since I've doing this, I only accept Paypal. (Or money orders and cashiers checks).
I average about 50-70 different visitors a day and get approximately 1 sale a day.
I have been wondering if anyone has stats on how much business I am losing not accepting credit cards without going through Paypal.

I just hate spending the money for a SSL certificate, setting up a gateway, a CC processor, etc.. for minimal sales. I figure that would take away my profit.
(I profit $15-$20 per sale.)

Another option I've been thinking about is to have customers call me and I could just get a manual CC processing account where I just punch in the numbers and not process the cards over the internet. What would I have to do to get something like that set-up and the costs involved?

Thanks for any help.

[BlueSky]

Don't worry about setting up all that stuff until you have the sales to justify it. I guess you could set up something to take cc's over the phone. Unless you were running a good size company though, I suspect many would feel more comfortable doing the transaction online where they can see their info was being handled securely. Have you thought about using another cc processor in addition to paypal?

[dmorison]

You try a week long experiment at the risk of loosing one or two customers; but with the possibility of justifying setting up "real" credit card facilities.

Rather than advertise that you accept payment simply by PayPal; remember that PayPal allow new customers to pay you by credit card, so say:

We can accept payment by MasterCard, Visa, Discover, American Express; or from your PayPal account

(Just don't mention that you use PayPal to accept credit cards. You won't be lying.)

As long as the customer can back out of the order you will get some idea of what impact PayPal has on your customers' decision process.

[rise2it]

Lease a shopping cart for $20 - $30 bucks a month - add a few lines of code to your webpages, the customer will click the 'buy' button and go to that carts' secure server. (Basically what you're doing with Paypal anyway).

I've got enough to keep up with - I don't need need the hassle of secure certificates and cart programming/upgrades.
I've been leasing carts for 6 years - sure I could've 'bought' several in that time, but this way I eliminate a lot of hassles.

And as you become more successful, you'll want to leave Paypal for a 'real' credit card processor anyway to get yourself some better rates.

As for Paypal only costing you sales....if I'm your prospect, it will.

I see a site that takes 'paypal only', and I assume they're not very big, not very old, and not very stable.

You've got your feet wet, you're having some success, time to 'move on up to east side'.....(Sorry, the Jeffersons just came on TV.....)

[wiskur]

rise2it

Thanks. That's a good idea. Do you have any recommendations for leasing shopping carts?
Thanks.

[ebizpro]

Here are 3 remotely hosted shopping carts to consider:

* ProfitCart
* QuickPayPro
* 1ShoppingCart

[DylanW]

If you want something relatively simple to try out, you could try a free cart. We use Mal's eCommerce (mals-e.com).

It works like the manual processing scenario you described above (customer sends their order and CC info, Mal's stores it on a secure server, sends you an email with order details, and you have to log in to download the CC info). It also handles PayPal, and if you ever want to use an online CC processor, you can upgrade to the premium account (not sure what the cost is per month, IIRC it's pretty reasonable).

[amznVibe]

you'll want to leave Paypal for a 'real' credit card processor anyway to get yourself some better rates

huh? You can do better than 2.9% merchant rate with no other fees of any kind, with instant withdrawl via a mastercard debit card?

If you happen to sell on ebay you get 1.5% of that back too.

Not sure how you can beat that rate, especially for lower volumes.

Using paypal's "cart upload" feature, you can keep them on your site the entire time (using cookies of course but that's a given for any system) and then just to one big checkout to paypal at the end. They don't even have to know about PayPal till they are ready to check out

[sun818]

hey wiskur, accepting actual credit cards was the best thing I could do for my web store. mals-e.com is a perfect solution to start with. Their free version includes 1) Paypal gateway and 2) offline CC processing.

For offline processing, I used ProPay.com for many years. I took the CC details from Mal's cart and keyed it in at the ProPay web site. If you decide on ProPay, I will warn they have a BS $20 "annual sales report" fee. They say your sales record are archived after 90 days, but really all your sales data is online. They just won't let you access it! So, I suggest you download your sales report on a monthly basis.

[edited by: sun818 at 3:47 pm (utc) on Sep. 30, 2003]

[wiskur]

I'm currently using the Paypal system and just advertise that I accept all credit cards through the Paypal network. So far I am very happy. No one has ever emailed me being dissatisfied, and I have had a couple of people email me to help them get set up on Paypal.

I know I've lost customers because some people don't want to waste the time verifying everything with Paypal if they don't have an account already.

And yes, I was looking into other options, and Paypal's was the lowest percentage I could find also.

I think I'm leaning towards just to keep Paypal as my credit card processor for now. And to see how much a manual CC processor on site runs if someone wants to call in an order.

Thanks for the replies so far! Keep em coming!

[wiskur]

Looks like I'm going to have to check out mals-e.com. Thanks!

[rise2it]

wiskur,

stickied you the urls of some carts

[apsunick]

why not use a shopping cart that has an off-line mode where you can get the credit cards through your admin panel. This way you keep the shopping cart but can run them manually off-line. A cart that does this is [digishop.digisoft77.com....]

[derekwong28]

Our average profit is also $15 per order. We get around 20 orders per day of these only 3 are paid for with PayPal and the others through Worldpay.

There is no way of knowing whether or not these 17 customers would have used PayPal if it was the only method available. However, it must be assummed that a sizable proportion of business would have been lost.

There are actually a couple of cheap online credit card payment systems available but they are notorious for poor service.

[chuladi]

Don't worry about setting up all that stuff until you have the sales to justify it.

It is a catch 22. It will probably take you longer to get the sales BECAUSE you are only accepting PayPal.

[wiskur]

Thanks everyone for replying.
After exploring the many options people have offered, it looks like using the mals-e shopping cart (free and uses both Paypal and Credit Cards) and ProPay as my processor will work the best for me now.
I will be able to get the credit card info from mals-e and then go to propay and process the card there. Propay rates are quite a bit better than 2checkout.
And I don't want to spend the funds to set up a real merchant account at this time.

If anyone has any thoughts on this approach (negative or positive), please let me know.

Now I've got to go start working on it.

Thanks.