Is Paypal Costing You Sales?
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.
It might seem that simple but I refuse to hand over my credit card info to Google.
Your safest bet is to gain PCI compliance and keep your brand name strong with a good on site credit card ordering form.
People don’t care if a merchant they don’t know gets their credit card number. They hand it over everytime they dine, everytime they purchase something in a store… ect…
Google and Paypal have huge phish networks out to attack their client base, and one is a huge advertising network which uses behavioral advertising techniques.
In any event… run your own statistics, offer people dedicated and off site processing, 9 times of ten they will stay onsite and prefer to use the dedicated, in some instances, they will return from the third party site to process payment through your own website.
Hi James – Thanks for your comment. I can’t really disagree with you as I often use an ecommerce website’s inhouse system and usually have no problem giving them my creditcard. However, many of the people that come to my bootcamps start out as “micro” retailers – they are selling a couple of downloadable products and they need a quick easy and cheap way to get started. GoogleCheckOut and Paypal fit the bill – at least in the beginning.
cheers – Ryan