51–60 of 86 posts
Amazon Payments is often overlooked as a fine alternative to Paypal, for those who have had issues with Paypal's... inethical business practices. Moxie Marlinspike uses it to accept donations for example.
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What sort of business are you in that you're fighting with your customers over chargebacks? Couldn't you interpret this as something being horribly broken with the way you handle refunds? If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he tal…
It's all about where the customer enters the process. If they are using the software and say, "Hey I think this sucks" then they will likely go to your site and request a refund. If, however, they look at their credit card statement and think, "I didn't like that program, I meant to cancel it" or "Hey I don't remember buying anything from ABC Software" (because the name of your product is "Really Cool Thing Pro") the…
I used to recommend PayPal Website Payments Pro until they screwed me recently. I assumed the people that were abused by PayPal were few and far between until it also happened to me. Now I tell everyone to get a real merchant account. It's just not worth gambling with your ability to process transactions.
The fraud protection stuff at PayPal is better, though not great (too many false positives to call it great), and our rates are much lower.
I do have a fear that someday they'll just decide to screw us and close our account, since it has happened to so many people. That'd be a bad day, for sure. But, in the meantime, I'm spending less money and have a dramatically better UI for managing things like chargebacks and refunds.
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Do get back to us in about 6 months to let us know how your merchant account is performing in regard to chargebacks. In my experience, we never win with our merchant bank, yet almost always win with PayPal.
What sort of business are you in that you're fighting with your customers over chargebacks? Couldn't you interpret this as something being horribly broken with the way you handle refunds? If you're selling software, there's no reason you should ever have a chargeback happen against you. Just make sure your policy is to refund anybody for any reason at any time. I remember reading a JoelOnSoftware article where he tal…
This is a fairy story.
We have a no questions asked 60 day full refund policy. We have at least one chargeback a week due to stolen credit cards. We, of course, don't have any reason to fight them over it, so we just accept the chargeback when that happens. But, we definitely get chargebacks.
I do occasionally get phone calls from people who don't know who we are. I answer their questions, and if the description doesn't ring a bell (sometimes they'll say, "Oh, I need to ask our system administrator if he bought that." and I never hear from them again), I process a refund immediately.
But, software companies definitely get chargebacks. There's no way to completely avoid fraud without refusing lots of legitimate customers (AVS, for instance, doesn't work for most non-US card holders, and we do half of our business outside the US, so we can't reject orders with an AVS mismatch).
I used to recommend PayPal Website Payments Pro until they screwed me recently. I assumed the people that were abused by PayPal were few and far between until it also happened to me. Now I tell everyone to get a real merchant account. It's just not worth gambling with your ability to process transactions.
We switched from a merchant account to PayPal because of fraud and a dramatic increase in fees during the time we used the account. By the time we moved we were paying over 4%, plus flat fees! We were also dealing with several fraudulent orders a week, and the process for dealing with them required faxing documents back and forth, which is just idiotic. The fraud protection stuff at PayPal is better, though not great…
Unfortunately, that's sort of standard practice for credit card processors, even ones that we've seen people recommend on HN. We've got it in our contracts with http://FeeFighters.com processors that they can NEVER raise pricing, don't have any hidden fees, and we have reviews on them so you can see how other people have liked them.
I don't know enough about fraud protection at PayPal, but we've heard a lot of horror stories when people come over to merchant accounts.
I cover it a little here: http://peachshake.com/2010/06/15/saas-subscription-billing-o...
Hmm... So if I want to have $0.99 payments, it will cost me 32% to go with paypal or 26% to go with setting up my own merchant account, and both are only for domestic payments. Suddenly Apple's 30% for payments from ~100 countries sounds like a bargain.
I haven't figured out how to actually get these rates yet, but I've just started looking into micropayments options, and PayPal looks like one of the best.
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We switched from a merchant account to PayPal because of fraud and a dramatic increase in fees during the time we used the account. By the time we moved we were paying over 4%, plus flat fees! We were also dealing with several fraudulent orders a week, and the process for dealing with them required faxing documents back and forth, which is just idiotic. The fraud protection stuff at PayPal is better, though not great…
SwellJoe - you were paying way too much for your merchant account... Unfortunately, that's sort of standard practice for credit card processors, even ones that we've seen people recommend on HN. We've got it in our contracts with http://FeeFighters.com processors that they can NEVER raise pricing, don't have any hidden fees, and we have reviews on them so you can see how other people have liked them. I don't know eno…
Yeah, I know. That's why we switched to PayPal.
The rates started out great (I think it was 2.1% when we started). Then they climbed every few months to being ridiculously expensive; they'd labeled our business "high risk", or something, somewhere along the way (despite the fact that all of the problems were because their fraud protection mechanisms were nonexistent). Doing anything about it required sending faxes back and forth with the provider, and waiting on the phone for half an hour to talk to a human, who would fax us forms, and then ignore them when we faxed them back.
Anyway, at this point, I have a strict No Fax policy. If a company requires me to fax them something, or requires me to accept faxes from them, I won't do business with them, under any circumstance. The merchant services thing was the last straw on that front, and it seems the majority of merchant services companies still want to do business via fax (even BrainTree, last time I checked, who are reportedly a great company to work with...but if I have to fax them, even once, I'm not going to ever be their customer).
Basically, discussing merchant services with me is like poking a hornets nest with a stick. I hate those people. I've dealt with a number of merchant services companies over the past dozen years I've run businesses, and I've hated every single one of them with a fiery passion. There may be good ones, but I've never met one I liked.
I don't like how much PayPal charges, either, but they've yet to screw me over, so far. And, the rates are close enough to merchant providers that I wouldn't be willing to send a single fax to change it (and if history is any indicator, I'd have to send/receive dozens of faxes a year, if I switched back to a regular merchant account).
Did I mention Square?
My life is much easier for sure. No Paypal Bulls*it.
Square. Square. Square... Did I mention Square? http://www.sqaureup.com My life is much easier for sure. No Paypal Bulls*it.