That wisdom is past it's use-by date.

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?

[2] https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/account-optional

> Paypal no longer allows users to make credit card payments without an account

> 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.

I did it a couple of days back, so it still works. I have a paypal account for business, but not personal shopping. So I always use paypal simply as a payment processor for personal items.

We use use normal credit card processing through stripe and support paypal as well (as well as a few other options).

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.

At least from Italy I'm still able to use PayPal without an account, FYI

Same from France and UK.

I very recently bought a watch online from a private seller and paid through Paypal without an account. So this appears to still work?

I don't see anything PayPal offers that Stripe can't do better. Why put yourself at risk of arbitrary catastrophe at the hands of a company like PayPal that wants to act like a bank while weaseling around the legal protections against bank malfeasance?

A major difference is that customers can pay through PayPal from a PayPal balance whether they have a credit card or not.

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

>A major difference is that customers can pay through PayPal from a PayPal balance whether they have a credit card or not.

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.

You're right — to clarify, I was trying to make the point that one can pay via PayPal with their PayPal account balance, as opposed to via any type of card (credit, debit, ATM, prepaid Visa gift card, etc). So, one can use PayPal without a credit or debit card. Stripe does not offer anything analogous to that.

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.

And you can get cash into paypal without a bank account at all.

For instance, https://www.paypal-cash.com/index.html

In Austria you can't really get these debit cards, and my understanding is that it's pretty difficult to get them in Germany as well.

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.

Those cards are pretty standard in America too. If you open a checking account, you'll almost certainly get a Visa or Mastercard credit/debit card.

At least in Sweden, the youth cards are usually completely blocked from online transactions.

Stripe can accept payments from anywhere. The merchant has to be located in one of those countries (or have a bank account there).

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).

Outside of the US and Canada credit cards are not as widespread as they need to be to base your business solely on Stripe.

It would be interesting to see where in the world PayPal is big. In most parts of Europe, PayPal is pretty much unheard of, because our banks don't suck, so PayPal never offered any improvements over just regular bank transfers.

>In most parts of Europe, PayPal is pretty much unheard of

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.

Really..? I thought PayPal was extremely popular everywhere in Europe

In Scandinavia, the only people who know what PayPal is are the ones who maybe bought something over eBay, or the ones wanting to send money to a friend in the US, and being completely surprised by how hard that turns out to be.

There's 0 domestic use cases for PayPal there. Other parts of Europe I'm not so sure about.

Really? Odd.

Good to know, though.

For me, the advantage of PayPal is that I don't need to host my own web server (at home or in the cloud) and maintain code in order to take credit card payments. I realize it's just programming, but it's programming that I don't trust myself to do in a way that's reliable and secure.

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.

You could use a business bank account with an associated debit card. Continue accepting PayPal but only use it as a processor and transfer funds to your business account regularly. This also makes it easier to have multiple payment methods, like if you want to test Stripe. It's a little bit more work but it's probably worth it. Oh, and most banks let you download some sort of spreadsheet for accounting.

Stripe doesn't support (most) parts of the world.

It's not always about features. Plenty of international vendors only accept PayPal transfers. It's then our discretion to not do business with those vendors but there's the rub.

Shopify doesn't allow Stripe, they force you to use Shopify Payments which I have no interest in using, they set their own rules and guidelines that I do not approve of.

Shopify Payments is Stripe on the back end though, what rules do they put on top?

For one, Payouts are 7-days in arrear where as with Paypal it's instant. Second, Shopify just started with this processing thing and they are amateurs at it, support has been horrible and they also keep changing their rules and requirements since this is all new to them. The shopify payments team also does not get on the phone, just email, i try and stay away from companies that do that. The irony is paypal just did it to me...

I'd like to hear more specifics. It's hard for me to fathom a market where using a shady outfit like PayPal would be "mandatory" - unless the market itself is shady.

Ever hear of EBay? The whole thing is shady, and PayPal is a defacto requirement.

Yes it is. But I assume the OP wasn't talking about eBay.