Recommendations for Website Payment Systems?

An anonymous reader asks: "I run a smallish website that provides stock quotes, charts, etc for a very under-reported stock market. (I won't link here due to the Slashdot Death Ray effect, and because this is a real question, not an advertisement). Over the recent weeks, many of my site members have been asking if they could make a small contribution to help off-set costs, which I am considering. 'Tip Jars' seem tacky and I know many people aren't comfortable with Paypal. So, should I roll my own, or are there any highly recommended ways of doing this that I am missing? Any suggestions?"

Comments

Re:Paypal?

[John_Booty]

Yep. I started by accepting only PayPal on my site, and then started accepting credit cards as well. The credit card stuff is a huge hassle.

You can now accept credit card payments over PayPal as well, if you're a verified member and you have PayPal linked to a bank account. It's worked really well for my (very small) business... PayPal charges fees on each transaction, obviously, but it's a turnkey solution... none of the hassles described by the above poster, who had to deal with separate credit card merchants.

There are some downsides to PayPal, but those are well-documented all over the 'net. But most of the PayPal "horror stories" I've seen don't sound any worse than typical hassles you'd get with any credit card processor.

The typical PayPal "horror story" seems to go like this. "This guy PayPal'd me N dollars! Then PayPal reversed the payment because there was evidence of credit card fraud. Now I don't have my #)*&#)%%^ N dollars! WTF, (*&%*$% PAYPAL!" ...Well, that definitely sucks, but guess what? That's a risk that you take as a merchant whenever credit cards are involved. People will commit credit card fraud. You will have charges reversed. PayPal or not.

My advice: if you do go with PayPal, take extra care to let your customers know they can pay with PayPal via credit card even if they don't have a PayPal account. The perception is that you have to sign up to pay with PayPal, and it's not true any more.

I've only been using them for a month, though. So take this very tentative endorsement with a grain of salt. But it was easy to implement and so far, so good. (And I *have* implemented e-commerce solutions from scratch before using other products like PayFlowPro, at previous jobs. Just FYI.)