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

Paypal?

[avalys]

Most of the people who are uncomfortable with Paypal are the ones who think whining about it makes them seem experienced or intelligent. For simply sending money, there's nothing wrong with it (as long as you don't mind using them).

The money you lose from people who enjoy bragging about how they refuse to use Paypal will be more than made up for by the time you save not having to implement something like this yourself.

Re:Paypal?

[bcrowell]

The money you lose from people who enjoy bragging about how they refuse to use Paypal will be more than made up for by the time you save not having to implement something like this yourself.
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. It's not just the hassle of setting it up initially, it's the hassles that come after that. For instance, I got a $1000 order from a woman an Nigeria who was using a stolen CC number. The CC companies I've had to deal with generally have horrible support. One thing you might not realize is that when you set this kind of thing up, you're not just setting up a business relationship with the company you signed up with. Although the company I signed up with was PayQuake (not recommended, BTW), I've actually had to work with all of the following: PayQuake, Authorize.net, Global Payments, American Express, Discover. Discover kept pestering me to add their card to my account. I said no, because my business is 95% wholesale, and people don't use Discover for wholesale. Well, all of a sudden, I started getting charged a certain amount every month to take Discover. They'd just gone ahead and done it without my permission.

With hindsight, CC ordering is only worth it if you're really doing serious amounts of business.

Re:Paypal?

[vince1]

Most of the people who are uncomfortable with Paypal are the ones who Think whining about it makes them seem experienced or intelligent.

Excuse the bluntness, but that is pure bull crap! Take a look at the thousands of horror stories in the Paypal Wall of Shame on http://paypalwarning.com/.

I would say that class actions lawsuits and thousands of horror stories are very legitimate reasons to be "uncomfortable" with dealing with a company. Unless you are an idiot.

As it says on the paypalwarning.com site:

Can PayPal hold my money with no explanation? The answer is YES.
Can PayPal freeze my account for no reason? The answer is YES.
Can PayPal take money out of my account without my knowledge?
The answer is YES.

We used to use Paypal to sell on eBay but after finding it impossible to to update our credit card and having no phone number to resolve problems, we started searching the net to see what kind of other problems people were having. When we found the Wall of Shame, we closed the account and closed the bank account it was linked to before we became one of the victims.

I wish more people would boycott companies that treat people so dirty and quit rewarding them just because it appears to be convenient today.

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.)

Rolling your own payment system

[CDarklock]

I'd recommend going with some established solution that fits your budget. Rolling your own is likely to expose your users to all kinds of subtle security issues that could result in some nefarious jerk getting their credit card numbers or the like.

A creative solution I heard once was to auction "thanks" on eBay. For $2.50, you could buy the seller's "thanks", and you could buy as many (or as few) as you liked through the usual Dutch auction process. I don't know if anyone ever actually did this, but you might want to consider it.

Personally, I always use PayPal for website donations. I've never had anyone object.