Hacker News Reader

Comment by ramit | Hacker News Reader

I accept a fairly high volume of payments and intentionally don't accept Paypal. Here's why:

1. 99.9% of my paying customers have a credit card <---this is #1 for a reason

2. I've only had ~3 customers ever complain about my lack of Paypal. I made a special arrangement for 1. She ended up canceling.

3. Paypal doesn't allow the custom flows (upsells, cross-sells) that I can do with my shopping cart

4. Paypal doesn't integrate as nicely with my backend analytics, and I prefer to have all my sales centralized

5. Hearing bad bad horror stories about Paypal is just another, distant reason why I feel no urge to use them

Hope this helps.

View on HN

Question here:

2. You say that 3 customers complained. Is your product/service so specific that users that can't pay using PayPal complain? Are you sure that they just don't go away? What if you lost 297 customers?

Doubtful. In order to find out why people don't buy, we do heavy, ongoing customer research/surveys/phone calls with people who are on our prospect list but haven't purchased after the expected purchase time frame.

Hardly anyone, ever, has said "I haven't bought your course because you don't support Paypal."

It certainly does help, thank you Ramit. Have you done any split testing to see if your conversions increase with PayPal though? Any thoughts/data on having PayPal as a secondary payment option, for those who prefer it?

Great question.

No, we haven't split-tested the addition of Paypal. We're constantly running tests, but this is a low-priority one for us based on extensive customer research.

Since we can't test it all, we pick the biggest potential wins (e.g., headlines and offers) and run them as rigorously as possible.

I do know that IMVU offers an insane number of payment options, but I think this may have more to do with their particular userbase.

Hey Ramit, for reason #1, I thought paypal also does credit card processing aswell?

Sure, but if you already have credit card facilities then that PayPal feature is redundant.

Makes sense.

What do you use instead of Paypal? Authorize.net?

Also, what shopping cart do you use?

I'm currently using e-junkie, but curious as to what else is out there that works well.

Thanks, Ramit.

I use Authorize.net with 1Shoppingcart. It works pretty well. I'm starting to come up against some technical limitations (like a lack of trigger emails for shopping-cart recovery), but overall, I'm very happy with the solution.

EJunkie and Payloadz are actually very good for simple shopping carts. In fact, they can do some pretty complex stuff like cross-sells and affiliate tracking. When you start finding yourself hitting technical limitations (like upsells not working the way you want them to, or you want to do more complex trials), you'll know it's time to upgrade providers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com