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Is Paypal Costing You Sales?

I have always taken if for granted that Paypal is a good thing for merchants. I have used Paypal for several years. In fact, I prefer it over any other payment method.

Why?

With Paypal, I can use my credit card without exposing my card number to merchants who I do not know. Payment usually only takes a few moments and if I am not using a credit card, I simply enter my Paypal email address and do not have to enter my card number.

What could be easier?

However, at the last Web Whisperers Bootcamp which I co-taught with Bill O’Hanlon (Hi Bill), I noticed that a substantial number of participants had issues with Paypal, telling us that they would never use the service. Several days ago, one of my SEO clients told me that he would not use Paypal to send me my fee!

What’s going on here?

The issue that everyone mentioned was spam emails from Paypal. The complaint went something like this: “I would never use those guys, they keep sending me spam emails, trying to get me to log into my account - even though I don’t have one!”

It’s unfortunate, because the spam is not from Paypal. The spam is from, well, spammers (also called “phishers”) who are trying to trick Paypal users into giving away their account information.

Paypal is safe. They do not spam. They encrypt your information and financial data with military-style encyrption.

But guess what folks? If people think that Paypal isn’t safe, they are not going to use it. If they are your only payment processor, you are likely losing money. Consider having a secondary processor for those who won’t use Paypal.

In the same way - If you do NOT have Paypal you are probably also losing sales. I didn’t finish a recent order for a digital product (it was an audio mp3) because I didn’t know the merchant, their order form was way too long, and they didn’t offer Paypal. I was at an airport, had little time, and their order form would have taken me several minutes to fill out. I could have checked out in 30-seconds with Paypal. Sale Lost. Game over.

Cheers for now - Ryan

*Update 2/24: I added Google Checkout to My Sales Page - Simple

I use e-Junkie’s “fat free” shopping cart to sell my digital products. Adding Google Checkout was as simple as signing up for the service and then adding my google merchant number to my ejunkie account page. Ejunkie then added a “pay via google checkout” button to my shopping cart. I have made a sale using google checkout, but it is too soon to know if this will represent an increase in sales over only using Paypal.