When offering PayPal as your ONLY form of payment, don’t just list the “PayPal” logo as your “preferred payment method”. Instead, providing you have either a PayPal Business account or PayPal Premier account, list out all the icons of the credit cards you accept in addition to the PayPal logo. Believe it or not, many potential customers still don’t realize that you can pay by credit card using PayPal (without having your own PayPal account).
Because of this, by saying you offer PayPal as the “payment method”, you will likely lose potential sales from customers that think “well, I don’t have a PayPal account so I can’t shop here”. You can capture some of those lost sales by simply saying you accept “Visa, MasterCard, American Express, etc…” (anything that your PayPal account allows them to pay with) … AND PayPal.
Now, what you have done is spoke in the “customers language”. Instead of telling them you only accept PayPal, you are telling them you accept MANY forms of online payment, and PayPal (using the “email way”) is simply one of them.
Don’t have a PayPal account? Click here to start one today! Start accepting credit cards from your e-commerce store today! It’s free, easy, and safe.
JW says
That doesnt help much. People dont want to sign up for paypal and simpy close the whole screen. I havent sold but 4 items in a year with paypal on my site. You need 2 accounts to really make it on the net.
Eric Leuenberger says
Actually, you may have mis-read the post. The post talks about how to capture additional sales using PayPal … not use it as your only payment method. It also covers how to properly word the phrase so as to let users know they do NOT need a PayPal account to purchase from you.
That brings me to the last point.
You do not need a PayPal account in order to purchase through PayPal. That was how it was LONG ago, but that changed quite a while back. A user does not have to sign up for a PayPal account in order to purchase with a credit card from a site. You have to enable this option from within your PayPal account though.
One other thing to note is that just because PayPal doesn’t seem to work for one site does not mean it won’t work for others. Oftentimes you have to look at your market to determine if PayPal is right as an optional payment method for your company.
Stores with more users with the demographic that fits “ebay” buying (those that you would find buying products on ebay etc…) prefer to purchase using eBay. However, if you sell B2B, then PayPal may not be the best option for you.
It all depends. The key though is this. If you use it as the article instructed (as an ADDITIONAL payment method that complements your own) then you should be able to recover sales that you may have lost had you not provided that option.
Look in your case. You may have only sold 4 items all year through PayPal, but if you didn’t provide that method, you would have more than likely LOST every one of those sales. So would you rather add sales to your bottom line or loose them? I think adding any amount of additional sales to your bottom line is always wise if you are looking to build a business.
Kathy says
I hate PayPal and I don’t want to use credit cards online. I always ask vendors if I can pay them by Postal Money Order. Most of the time, unless they’re out of the country, they’ll say yes.
James Lee says
Had no idea that paypal allowed this now. I stopped buying on Ebay years ago because I didn’t like paypal because they kept fingering my linked bank account and credit card moving money around for no reason. Since that time any place I saw “paypal only” has been avoided like the plague. If accounts link through paypal lets me pay direct from my credit card…a lot of people did lose sales from me.