Paypal Payments: An Almost Complete Solution
September 07, 2018
Paypal Payments: An Almost Complete Solution
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with PayPal Payments
I've been using Paypal Payments for my small business, as well as a fundraiser event I produce, for a number of years. Our experiences have been with transactions coming from our websites, not card swiping on location. Paypal Payments is kind of the original, easy to use, online payment portal, in my opinion. It's easy to use and doesn't cost any more than the transaction fee, plus accepts all major credit cards. Many people already have Paypal accounts and are familiar with it. However, even if you don't have a Paypal account, a customer can still use the portal for the transaction.
- Paypal Payments does a great job of interfacing with a website. If you have one product or item for purchase, it's easy to have the site create the code for a payment button. In other cases, we have integrated WooCommerce with Paypal so the entire shopping cart transaction can be simply handled by Paypal Payments.
- Once a transaction is completed, it often ends up in your Paypal account immediately. From there, you can transfer the funds to your account (usually 1 or 2 business days). As many businesses take Paypal as payment these days, you can use those funds for your own business purposes if you would like.
- The fraud protection of Paypal Payments is worth noting. If a transaction seems unusual, a hold may be put on the transaction until the funds clear. This doesn't happen often. In addition, Paypal does provide phone support if a transaction turns out to be fraudulent.
- It would be nice to be able to customize the payment page in Paypal Payments to better match the website look. Currently, we can only add our logo and business name.
- While the button code feature is nice and very helpful, it would be great to have more choices of how those buttons look. We get around that by designing our own button and using the link code (on our clients' sites that only need one button, not a whole shopping cart.)
- Definitely, a positive impact for our business is to be able to easily take credit/debit cards. Compared to a few years ago, waiting around for checks to be written and sent can impact cash flow. Currently, we have about 50% of our clients paying via Paypal Payments, and the fee we pay for that payment balances out (we think) versus waiting several weeks for a check to arrive in the mail.
- One negative impact is the misconception we've run into over the years is that you have to have a Paypal account to use this gateway. Of course, that's not true and once we point this out, usually we have no trouble. Occasionally still, we have to make arrangements for our clients to pay via Square or accept a check, because they are not quite into the 21st century.
- Another positive impact for us is that money transfers from our Paypal account to our bank account take, on average, one business day. Paypal states it will take up to three, but our experience is that it is much shorter.
Honestly, we use Paypal because of the easy interface with our websites, and the fact that Paypal Payments comes included in the Woocommerce plugin. Square requires the purchase of an extra plugin. Square, I believe, has a better POS setup. We do use Square on site for our sports fundraiser I produce, and with the chip reader, Apple pay puck, we feel that we have a more secure transaction portal than the slide reader of Paypal. Square costs more than Paypal Payments when it comes to POS, but we're really talking about a hundred dollars. The fees are about the same per transaction. So, in summary, we use Paypal Payments almost exclusively for website commerce, and the Square interface for POS.