

Ask HN: Why do 37signals and others not accept PayPal? - egmike

Hi all,<p>I've been wondering about this for a while. It seems as though there are a lot of people out there who would prefer to use PayPal to pay for things online, either due to lack of a credit card, or because they already have a PayPal balance from selling things online, or even just because they feel PayPal is secure and/or familiar.<p>I've searched the 37signals' website and blog for a reason, but didn't find anything, and it seems like others are taking the same approach.<p>Can anyone shine any light on this?<p>Thank you.
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ramit
I accept a fairly high volume of payments and intentionally don't accept
Paypal. Here's why:

1\. 99.9% of my paying customers have a credit card <\---this is #1 for a
reason

2\. I've only had ~3 customers ever complain about my lack of Paypal. I made a
special arrangement for 1. She ended up canceling.

3\. Paypal doesn't allow the custom flows (upsells, cross-sells) that I can do
with my shopping cart

4\. Paypal doesn't integrate as nicely with my backend analytics, and I prefer
to have all my sales centralized

5\. Hearing bad bad horror stories about Paypal is just another, distant
reason why I feel no urge to use them

Hope this helps.

~~~
daliusd
Question here:

2\. You say that 3 customers complained. Is your product/service so specific
that users that can't pay using PayPal complain? Are you sure that they just
don't go away? What if you lost 297 customers?

~~~
ramit
Doubtful. In order to find out why people don't buy, we do heavy, ongoing
customer research/surveys/phone calls with people who are on our prospect list
but haven't purchased after the expected purchase time frame.

Hardly anyone, ever, has said "I haven't bought your course because you don't
support Paypal."

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hellweaver666
I frequently look for a PayPal button / logo because I'm lazy. My card details
are saved with PayPal and it's easier to enter my email address and password,
then click confirm than to get my card out of my wallet and type the details
in manually.

As a consumer, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the end cost (most
of the time, unless the merchant charges a PayPal Premium) and saves me time.

It's the same reason I buy most of my music from iTunes and pretty much
everything else from Amazon.

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mansilla
I recently stated this in another comment regarding payment systems.. I
wouldn't rely on just one. A merchant account through a bank CAN get suspended
or put on hold if you trip any risk ratios (e.g. inquiries, chargebacks,
refunds). So, indeed, PayPal does have its share of stories of accounts being
suspended without explicit reason; however, merchant banks have the same power
and believe me when I say that they can lock/suspend your account, and hold
your funds for 6 months without ANY detailed explanation and without interest.

Secondly, PayPal does have a new API called PayPal Adaptive Payments. It's
very flexible.. pre-approved payments, distributed payments (refunds also
mapped backwards), chained payments (multiple source accounts for making
payment). Full details on their API PDF docs (easy to understand):

[https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/...](https://cms.paypal.com/cms_content/US/en_US/files/developer/PP_AdaptivePayments.pdf)

So, even if you don't feel all warm and fuzzy about PayPal.. you should have
an account handy, and think about having it as a payment option on your site.
Some users swear by it because they don't have to share any sensitive credit
card information (including CVV coddes) with the merchant.

~~~
desigooner
>>Some users swear by it because they don't have to share any sensitive credit
card information (including CVV coddes) with the merchant.

I tend to be one of those .. Dispute resolution with Paypal is a much better
experience as compared to dealing with, say Bank of America ... I was lucky to
have had my paypal account on itunes when I had some fraudulent purchases ..
No long claims process as with a bank .. The investigation and the matter was
settled within 3-4 days ..

Now I've read about paypal arbitrarily stopping services without any warnings
but other banks can be the same..

~~~
philwelch
Bank of America is a particularly crappy bank. US Bank is marginally better in
my experience, and ING Direct is by far the best. Particularly in terms of
dispute resolution, US Bank was very easy to work with, and settled the matter
within I think less than a week. (My ING Direct debit card number has yet to
be stolen, and when a whole bunch of debit card numbers were leaked by a third
party, they preemptively mailed me a brand new card along with a friendly
letter explaining the situation.)

But the real solution for dispute resolution is to use an ordinary credit card
and put through chargebacks on any and all fraudulent purchases. Lacking the
stomach to keep a credit card I don't do this myself, but I hear chargebacks
are very easy by design.

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noodle
probably because of the fact that paypal is an unreliable source on which to
build a business once it becomes big enough.

there are too many horror stories.

~~~
hellweaver666
This was a constant worry in my previous business (in the retail sector), but
we did over £140,000 (GBP) of sales through PayPal over the two years we were
active and never had a problem.

I'm considering using them with my new startup just for the first few months
while I get up and running, purely because the setup cost is free. If I can
prove the business idea works then I'll upgrade to a "proper" payment gateway.

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nRike
Well, i think 37Signals, YardEngine and GitHub uses BrainTree instead of
Paypal, and IMO BrainTree is the best solution. I was helping the guys of
<http://rega.la> to build the online payment part and i noted that for Credit
Card payment is so cool. Other way you can use is BOKU(<http://www.boku.com/>)
which uses mobile carriers to make the money transaction in 3 simple steps.

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pjhyett
I'd add Paypal support to GitHub if Braintree integrated it with their system
so I wouldn't have to interface with Paypal directly. Too many horror stories.

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pinksoda
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1598227>

