Wouldn’t matter to me. I don’t use paypal and probably won’t any time in the next decade. They scream “evil empire” to me far more than very evil Mastercard or Visa do.
Japan. The two specific problems I ran into were when I had only a US card it was basically impossible to enter a Japanese shipping address through PayPal, which made it effectively useless for ordering things for myself. Any site that used PayPal exclusively was a site I couldn’t order from. Even if my PayPal account wasn’t used, the way they set up the form for order processing made it impossible to ship to a non-US address if you were using a US credit card. When I contacted them and explained the situation, they said it was a fraud prevention policy and said that it was unlikely that they’d change their system.
The other way around was a problem too: I wanted to buy something for a relative in the US and wanted to use my Japanese card. I figured that must be pretty common. Someone buying something as a gift for someone else. Nope. No provision to change the shipping address to a country other than the credit card’s country of origin, even if that address is simply a shipping address.
They may have changed this policy in the last couple of years (the most recent problem I had was late 2007) but that was a block for me using PayPal for at least 5–6 years since I first encountered it. I guess it’s probably fine if you have accounts in all the countries you want to send things to or order from, but if you have a mixed-residence situation, you’re kind of screwed.
Hi - I figured I’d provide an update…
Earlier this week (partially based on the comments here) I went ahead and enabled Paypal. Based on the responses so far in this thread, since some people do find it more convenient, and there’s a perception by some that it’s more secure, I’ll just keep it.
Since I turned on the functionality, about 35% of purchasers have opted to pay with PayPal. I don’t know how many of those would have paid by credit card, or if any of them would have gone elsewhere if I didn’t have PayPal.
I intend to change my (non-Paypal) “Go to Checkout” button to try and make it stand out more so the PayPal button doesn’t overwhelm it.
I don’t think I will raise my prices since they are $49.99 and $24.99. Going from $49.99 to $51.00 seems a little risky…
Thanks again for all the comments and insight!
Ah, I see. I’ve only ever ordered stuff to addresses in the UK with a UK card.
Paypal itself doesn’t ask for the delivery address though, IME - the various sites I’m buying from do that before I get to the payment section.
Depends on how they have the ordering set up, I think. Some sites have PayPal handle all that too, and get the shipping address from the report PayPal sends when the payment is confirmed.
Yes.
Actually, the report isn’t even necessary. PayPal for example is tightly integrated into my shopping cart, where even if you use “PayPal Express checkout”, and don’t create an account through me, PayPal sends my shopping cart all your information (with the exception of your credit card number) and an account for you is automatically created in our shopping cart.
An update on my original OP. I found that people using PayPal to checkout jumped to 80%. So, I changed things around… I changed my PayPal method from “Express Payments” to something called “Website Payments”, where PayPal is just shown as an option at the time the person wants to make payment.
Previously, I think (but I’m not sure) that people just clicked on PayPal button button because it overshadowed my other checkout button. Now, people still can pay with PayPal at the time they select their payment method, but hopefully people won’t be “tricked” into using PayPal.