PayPal is by far, the easiest payment method currently available. You can set up a PayPal account in less than a minute. It takes a little longer to become certified, but if need be, you can accept a credit card or PayPal payment form someone with very little trouble and no paperwork. The PayPal module in osC is easy to configure and enable, and is proven to be stable (continue button neglect issues non-withstanding, but we’ll get into the IPN and Auto Return features and why they are important a little later). A PayPal account costs nothing to create, there are no monthly fees, and the per-transaction fees PayPal charges are the lowest in the industry. PayPal is the absolute best payment method available for a new ecommerce storefront owner, because you can get your store live and accepting payments, without much of an investment in time or money.
Sounds great, huh? Well, after you’ve had your store open for a week or two, consider this.
If you’ve never seen or used the traditional PayPal payment method, when the customer arrives at the Order Confirmation page of osC, summarizing their order details, and they click on the ‘confirm’ button, they are re-directed to the PayPal website. Once their, they will either log in to PayPal, create a PayPal account, or if the store owner has enables the option for customers to pay without having to create a PayPal account, they can elect that option. From there they go to the payment page of PayPal, and from there the payment confirmation page.
Ok, lets stop here for a moment to digest some of that. So far, we’ve been re-directed to a third party website to make a payment, and we’ve encountered 3 new pages to transverse at PayPal. That’s on top of the already ridiculously lengthy, 8 pages of the payment process that osC uses for a total of an 11 page checkout plus a re-direct to a third party website. Does this sound like an efficient checkout process to you? Anyone who knows anything about ecommerce will tell you that the longer your checkout is, the more customers you will lose. A checkout that is 11 pages long has got to be the longest checkout in the history of ecommerce.
Now, advocates of PayPal are going to stop you at this point, and let you know that there are over 72 million people out there that use PayPal. And that and those 72 million users will demand that they be put through the torture of an 11-page checkout for the privilege of using their PayPal account to make their purchases. But I’m here to re-assure you that not all of those 72 million users are still actively using their PayPal accounts today, as evidenced by all of the anti-PayPal websites in existence today. And even though someone uses PayPal to buy things on eBay, doesn’t always mean that they will buy a $2000 stereo from a store that offers PayPal as the only payment method.
I can tell you that there is a significant percentage of potential customers that are very loyal to PayPal. And these loyal PayPal account holders will often go out of their way (like 11 pages out of their way) to make a purchase using their PayPal account. This percentage of customers will often shop only at ecommerce stores that offer PayPal as a payment method. It is for this percentage of the online purchasing population that I recommend that you always offer PayPal.
But this percentage in no way represents even close to the majority of potential customers that will visit your store. And for the majority of customers that do not already have PayPal accounts, and that are not loyal PayPal customers, you need to offer them an alternative. 11 pages of checkout is entirely too much to ask a customer to endure. Heck, the 8 pages of osC checkout are too much to ask, but that’s a blog entry for another day.
If you are serious about your business, and you want to maximize your ecommerce storefront’s potential, the best configuration is to offer PayPal, in addition to another payment method in which the customer can enter their payment details right there, on your secure website. This offers the customers interested in using PayPal what they want, and people who prefer not standing on long DMV lines, being stuck in rush hour traffic, and 11 page checkouts what they want. The convenience to get what they want, and get the hell out of there in the shortest amount of time humanly possible.
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Original source:
http://wizardsandwars-oscommerce.blogspot.com/2005/07/when-should-you-use-paypal.html
