I know many people hate PayPal passionately, some apparently with good reason – they like to freeze accounts, play games with their Terms of Service, and have little support when you have a problem. Is Google Checkout any better or any different? Their fee structures seem to be the same.
I don’t need to know about other solutions, thanks. (I’m researching this for my employer who can take credit cards already, but is interested in setting up a new site shared with some other folks and using Weebly to create the site; Weebly supports PayPal and Google Checkout automatically, but if you convince me they both suck too hard, I can suggest we try coding our direct solution into the page ourselves. If that makes sense.)
Are you saying your employer already takes credit cards as a Web based card-not-present transaction, or they take them in a card-present point of sale situation and you’re trying to add an ecommerce site with Weebly?
Personally I think PayPal is a good alternative payment option for businesses who process credit cards already. I like it less as a primary payment method if you’re using it in the mode where people are redirected to paypal.com, log in, and send you payment securely. It’s too much of a hassle for people who don’t use paypal.
Now, if you mean using PayPal as a merchant services provider where customers enter their credit card directly, then that’s basically a cost decision. I don’t believe it alters the customer’s experience at all compared to say, using a normal merchant account and a payment gateway like Authorize.net.
I never had any good experience with Google Checkout. I don`t like it on the back end, I don’t like the front end, I don’t think enough people use it, and I found it horrible for International users.
By the way - I hope this isn’t insulting to anyone else - but there aren’t any problems with PayPal that should be a horrible problem for a serious business. The costs are higher than our costs with our merchant account, and we lose more disputes with Paypal than we do chargebacks with our merchant account. But they’re just costs of doing business. We know that a lot of our customers feel much better paying through Paypal so it’s worth it to have higher transactions costs for us. If it weren’t we wouldn’t offer paypal. Losing a dispute unfairly is an annoying expense but getting upset about it makes no sense, and that’s what, in my experience, people tend to do.
Employer already takes cards in e-commerce, and by phone and mail-order, but wants to add a small joint venture site using Weebly. More specifically, we’re a small publisher that retails books online and by catalog (and in real life through bookstores); joint venture is to be an author-driven subscription site. The authors will build the site with (what we hope will be) minimal help from us. We’ll be providing tech support for subscribers and some marketing for the site, but (we hope) the authors will do all the content and design directly.
This wasn’t my idea and I’m not convinced it’ll work – authors are notorious for big ideas with uneven follow-through – and if the authors don’t keep up with it, site maintenance and development will default to me. But hey, it’s a job.