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Google Payment Services Confirmed
In an annoucment today
Google CEO confirmed they are planning to create a payment
system. They seem to stress this system would not be in direct
competition with paypal because it will not focus person to person
payments, and will not hold the monies between transactions.
On the other side of this I recently found out that paypal is now offering an All-in-one payment solution.
This new solution allows you to use not only paypal users for payment,
but to actually accept credit cards and process them via paypal.
For my hosting clients I currently use Paypal’s Subscription service to
do the monthly payments. On a few occasions I have had to help
clients set up paypal accounts because they did not already have
one. This service would allow me to process real credit cards for
those customers, without requireing me to set up a merchant account and
all the other steps that are required for such things with services
like payflow and authorize.net.
In truth I am not sure that this is something I will go after because
part of the benifit of paypal is that they are responsible for all the
personal and banking information of thier clients. Although I
have built many ecommerce sites for clients, for my small consulting
business I dont think I care to take on those additional risks.
Anybody else have thoughts on such things? Anybody hate using
paypal? I think its great to not have to give out my credit
information to everyone. I even buy my domain names with
godaddy.com using my paypal account.
23 Jun 2005 Simeon
Personally, I pretty much refuse to use my paypal account for anything other than eBay stuff. I did a three year project for an eBay support company and seeing that way PayPal opperattes just scares the hell out of me.
The biggest problem you have with PayPal is that the rules are constantly changing. They really don’t know where they fall in a legal and regulatory sense.
Any merchant that is going to be doing substantial credit card sales is much better off using a good merchant account. Depending on your business, you can get your rate to almost half of the PayPal rate.
I’ve only had one real problem with PayPal. It involved them charging my account for shipping on something I was sending to an eBay buyer. They had an error on their form and the process bombed. Reloading the page hit my account again which overdrew it.
It took them six weeks to reverse the charges. In the mean time, I had to use a different service to ship the product. They had no way to reverse a charge to my account that they made. Customer service was pathetic.
In order to use their system, you have to open another checking account since they have the right to extract as much money as they want from any account you link. If you link one of your primary accounts to PayPal, you’re a nut.
I’ve also had instances where funds sent to me actually appeared in the wrong account. At one point I had two acconts, a personal one and a business one. For some reason, payments sent to my business account would go to my personal account. I then had to transfer the money manually. At least I didn’t need customer service.
Another problem I had was that it is very challenging to maintain a business account with them. Since they don’t send you a statement in the mail, you have to be on top of things to do your reconciliations and book your revenue.
You will also find that businesses will be very hesitant to set up a PayPal account to pay you. They prefer that you accept a company check or a business card. If all you offer is PayPal for payment, you might wind up turning businesses away.
I think PayPal is fine for the hobbyist. It works fine for the person that just wants to sell a few items to individuals, although you may have a hard time getting your money to a place you can actually use it.