

Ask HN: Does PayPal Discourage Sales? - thatusertwo

I&#x27;m selling a product online and noticed through analytics that users are clicking the buy button but no sales are occurring. The payment is done using PayPal but the user doesn&#x27;t know till they click through. Has anyone else noticed this problem? I&#x27;m selling 3 products on a one time basis, what payment processor should I use instead?
======
patio11
Many people process credit card payments through Paypal. If you're getting
_zero_ transactions, Paypal is unlikely to be your problem unless there is a
technical issue preventing you from charging cards at all.

Clicking the Buy button is not 100% proxy for purchasing intent,
_particularly_ if you have not disclosed e.g. the price prior to clicking it,
in which case the main user intent is "discover the price." Even if you have,
it is a regrettable fact of life that many users abandon that transaction at
the last moment. (This is why we optimize the heck out of those last moments.)

As to whether having Paypal as the only option costs you some transactions on
the margin: test it. I have, extensively, for one of my products. It's a long
story, but having a fairly well-optimized onsite purchasing flow was worth
about a 60% lift to purchases. (I had done many tests prior to that where not-
so-optimized onsite purchasing made no difference in conjunction with or
tested against Paypal.)

------
mhopkins321
I can't say if they discourage sales, but I recently had to work with their
API. After many fruitless hours I decided to convince the client/higher-ups
that stripe should be used instead.

I definitely feel as if they discourage the use of their API through poor
documentation and a test/sandbox site that will randomly drop you back into
production without notice

------
paulhauggis
Have you tried stripe?

