Comments on: Should You Be Relying On Paypal For Your Web Business?

By: Tabster

Tabster — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:07:30 +0000

I’ve recently had some trouble with Paypal, and I’ve never been too thrilled about their fees. I’ll definetly be giving paymate a try!

By: windwood

windwood — Thu, 06 Apr 2006 03:18:06 +0000

I will perfer paymate, my experience is that paypal customer service are useless. Most important is no way to complaint them.
How can you host an Help Deskside without any complaint department? well, paypal do.

By: Yaro

Yaro — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 03:31:33 +0000

Your point about using Paypal as a sort of Internet wallet is a good one Duncan. I often do the same thing, paying hosting bills and buying info products using my paypal account so I never need to transfer the cash into my bank account in Australia, provided my cashflow is good. It makes my bookkeeping painful but it gets done.

I believe the best option, and what I intend to do now, is make both Paypal and Paymate available to my clients and see which get used more often.

By: Duncan Riley

Duncan Riley — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 03:25:34 +0000

At the end of the day you need to consider more that just this in my opinion, because you are ignoring the extra market you get when you offer Paypal as opposed to Paymate. I suppose the best way to explain it is like this: a lot of people use Paypal like a bank account, they’ll get payments in for things and then pay for things out of it. I get advertising payments into my Paypal account and then I pay them out for things such a domain registeration, advertising, and other bits and pieces. If a company offers paypal I’m more likely to use them as well. Sure, its a hangover from the days you couldn’t set up an Australian account so it was difficult to get the money out, but I know a lot of people who use paypal like this.

Until recently I was also doing a fair bit on ebay as well and used Paymate and Paypal side by side. I’m not sure whether anyone ever used Paymate but plenty of people used Paypal (and these were Australian before Paypal.com.au was established!) Paymate’s fees were excessive and I dumped it after a couple of months.

I suppose the use of a service like Paymate depends on what you are selling, but I couldn’t possibly recommend the service. Paypal equals extra customers. Its not perfect, the exchange rate is pretty poor, but if you manage your account well and minise your withdrawals by using your Paypal funds to by services you require its a great service.

By: Yaro

Yaro — Mon, 19 Sep 2005 03:06:11 +0000

An update on this – Paymate have offered a deal that will effectively reduce my fees by just under $400 for the next 12 months, which will still be slightly more expensive than Paypal but much more reasonable given the extra protection and advantages of using Paymate.com.au.

I’ll be leaving my set-up pretty much as it is, encouraging Paymate as the first credit card option but making Paypal available too.

There is a good lesson in this – companies want your business so don’t be afraid to ask for something in order to keep your loyalties. I’m sure I would do the same if I was in Paymate’s situation given I’ve been worth quite a bit of money to them over the last couple of years, not to mention the 4 referrals I’ve brought in as well and probably a few more from this blog.

By: Benjamin Riches

Benjamin Riches — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:50:09 +0000

Wow, I think PayPal seem to have been doing a fair bit of copying and pasting in there support e-mails – it just doesn’t seem to answer your question! Oh, and well done on e-mailing Paymate and getting a slight reduction in fees. I’d say two sayings that I love apply here: If you don’t ask, you don’t get AND every little helps (actually a Tesco slogan!). Well done

By: PlusOne Marketing

PlusOne Marketing — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 06:44:44 +0000

LOL – yes paypal from my experience are renowned for coming back with totally stupid responses. I had one dealing with them – went on for over one week – almost 20 emails from them. About half had nothing to do with my query, a quarter said to do what i was originally asking about and the remaining quarter had something,but not all to do with my question.

I have only been using paypal for 6 weeks, but don’t find them especially cheap, especially when doing business in USD and then bringing it home in AUD as there exchange rate is REALLY BAD

By: Jason

Jason — Sun, 18 Sep 2005 05:54:59 +0000

I still enjoy paypal…but recently I have begun the task of setting up an online store to which I think I may actually need to get a real merchant account — but they are all so darn expensive. argh.