Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account[1]. Prior to this, paypal gave you access to an audience of anyone with a credit card. Now that they don't, your low-friction audience is restricted to people with actively used paypal accounts, which is pretty much 15-30 year old guys, and no one else. If you know anything about online sales, you'll know that any increased friction at checkout is a bad thing. Requiring people to make a paypal account at checkout time is probably dropping 20% of all customers and 70% of customers over 50. If you wanted to know why physical shops still exist, that's why.
You get a vastly wider reach with plain old Visa/Mastercard support, because anyone with a credit card can use it, no signup required. All adults have at least a Visa Electron (or regional equivalent), even if they don't have a real credit card, because that's what banks give out by default these days. Hell, most children will have them.
Normal credit card support is fine.
[1] By default at least. Paypals documentation[2] states this is still possible, but I haven't seen it work on any paypal shop for around a year, so either it's broken and they don't care or maybe no one reads the docs?
> Paypals documentation[2] states this is still possible, but I haven't seen it work on any paypal shop for around a year, so either it's broken and they don't care or maybe no one reads the docs?
From the last time I had to evaluate PayPal as an option, I seem to recall that they only allow people to make payments without an account a certain number of times. So if you have already made a payment through PayPal without a registered account a few times, you will be forced to create an account for any future payments. You've probably made enough payments that you've gone over the limit. I can't remember what the limit is, but I remember being surprised at how low it was.
40% of payments are still made through paypal.
How many of those customers would have aborted if we didn't support paypal? I don't know, but I'm sure it's a non-zero number.
People use PayPal from person to person for B/S/T forums. The PayPal user base is bigger in this community because anyone can accept payments without being a merchant, yet unlike dealing over Venmo there are still protections for the buyer.
Also, accepting payments worldwide is much more feasible. Stripe is in 25 countries [1]; PayPal is in 200 [2].
[1]: https://stripe.com/global
[2]: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/country-worldwide
Customers can pay through Visa whether they have a credit card or not:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Electron
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_Debit
As far as I can tell it might be only USA banks that don't issue these kinds of cards as standard, in place of a bank card.
I'm not sure about other countries but in the US, it is possible to open a bank account without a debit card attached to it.
For instance, https://www.paypal-cash.com/index.html
People here get useless Maestro debit cards. You can only get Visa/Mastercard credit cards. And very few people do, usually only people who travel to the US bother.
Not having a credit card is the main reason I see for people requesting PayPal (they may also prefer it if they already have an account, but that's not a deal breaker).
Thats depends a lot on the country though. Not accepting PayPal in Germany would probably be the same as not accepting credit card in the US. In the UK however only offering credit cards might work.
There's 0 domestic use cases for PayPal there. Other parts of Europe I'm not so sure about.
Good to know, though.
Also, PP makes my accounting extremely easy. I use my PP debit card for all of my business purchases, so I just download a CSV of the entire year's transactions, and compute my results in a spreadsheet, for my taxes.
Given the horror stories, I realize it's a risk, and I periodically go out and look for alternatives. Best case would be to have two options for customers, so my business could at least take orders even if one of the two goes down.
Also, their ToS are pretty clear that they can do whatever they want, based on their beliefs, and there are no explicit limits how long they can keep your funds, or even obligations to talk to you. It might work differently in the EU, where they are registered as a bank (and so are regulated as a bank), but in US that's not the case IIRC.
The behavior is not all that unexpected - it's easier and cheaper to loose a customer receiving a lot of complaints than to inspect each of the complaints. So while I understand this is pretty damaging and dislike what PayPal does, I'm surprised that people are surprised.
I belong to the second category. Also, it becomes harder to avoid such companies at all, for example cell phone operators in Europe universally view their "customers" as billable addresses; some find it cheaper to settle billing disputes in court (and lose a great percentage of the cases) than to maintain a "customer" service.
With mobile the solution is to go prepaid.
I'm baffled by this. Paypal does not. 28 days ago I wrote this comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624393. I'm sure that in the future I'll be reading another Paypal horror story from someone like you, who somehow thought, "It won't happen to me!"
E.g., I don't go to USA conferences because of the TSA risk, people find it funny, yet I keep hearing horror story after horror story. For Paypal, though, people take the risk unknowingly because they aren't aware of Paypal's reputation, which is more understandable.
For example, once you subscribe to a cable TV / cell phone operator / whatever, they'll keep you on that subscription until the contract ends, even if new customers can sign up for half the price. And even then it's a matter of how much you spend with them and if it's worth negotiating a better contract.
This has little to do with the corporations being intentionally 'evil', it's more about insufficient competition or even monopoly (how many cable TV operators / ISPs are in your area?). We have multiple cell phone operators over here, but they have little incentive to compete - the number of people leaving/joining each operator is about the same, and if one operator decreases the prices the others will do the same, eliminating any advantage.
Sure, and bottom-shelf plastic-bottle vodka says "PREMIUM QUALITY" on the label
Given the regs that paypal thinks it must abide, specifically the many vague US antiterror rules, anyone getting into bed with them runs massive risk. The internet is full of stories exactly like this. The only hope is to rally enough of social media, or a tv show, that a human being at paypal takes pitty in you.
No mainstream cc merchant account bank and payment processor will accept 1%+ chargebacks.
That type of account is categorized as "high risk" and you have to resort to processors that specialize in that area (e.g. adult, gambling, etc). One example says they can handle up to 3% chargebacks.[1] They will definitely make you pay for that privilege in multiple ways: higher setup fees, higher monthly service fees, higher transaction fees, higher reserve, longer hold times before releasing funds to you, etc.
I'm frankly astounded that PayPal was willing to let a 2% chargeback go on as long as you said they did. All my previous reading about PayPal's contentious relationship with VISA/MC network & member banks was that they do not want to be associated with "high risk" accounts.
[1] https://www.emerchantbroker.com/blog/need-a-payment-processo...
Those competing against PayPal? Not so much.