Paypal Customization

[Deliguy]

I have an interesting delima. I use Paypal for my processing on my home theater shopping site. I used to use the standard Paypal screen. We changed it so it matches our site(colors and logo) because we were getting calls from people complaining that they weren't comfortable being forwarded to another website to process their credit cards. Now I'm getting calls from customers because they are uncomfortable entering their Paypal information into our website(not realizing that it is infact Paypals website). So now my question revolves around conversions. Should I use the customized version of Paypal's payment page or not? We have only been using the customized version for about 2 weeks now so I haven't had enough time to calculate whether or not the conversion rate is higher or lower. Does anyone have any experience with this and can help me out?

[cyanide]

Hi Deliguy,
I moved your post to Ecommerce, as its more suited here.

Your conundrum is one that many people face and really, the easy answer is to not use paypal as your primary collection of funds, rather, use it as a secondary and find yourself a merchant account and gateway.

[sandro]

That is one of the danger of customizing the paypal interface. Paypal is so popular that people have no problem in using it...

Why not giving the 2 options?

1) paypal click here (with paypal familiar interface)
2) use our shopping cars and get 10% on your next product...something along those lines

Paypal cn be quite expensive and depending on the number of sales you might want to implement your own solution...see below. I have a FREE TRIAL...

sandrosalsi.com/articles/ecommerce-shopping-cart-software.html

[ADAM Web Design]

Deliguy, the simple answer to your question is "you can't."

PayPal has one of the worst and most useless APIs out there. Customization is minimal (at last check, you could only have a white or a black background for the payment pages, for example).

Your conversion rate will be much higher if you host your own payment pages. Most customers aren't aware that a third-party processor is involved with self-hosted pages most of the time, and when they are aware, couldn't care less.

[southplatte]

Paypal has a full merchant account setup that you can use now, paypal payments pro and you cna use their api to creat your own payment pages and host them yourself and it works just like a regular merchant account.

Plus it is cheaper - and appears as your name on the billing charge on the customer's statements.

[Deliguy]

Whats weird is everyone keeps telling me paypal is the expensive route, but I'm finding them the cheapest.
On my research I found:
2.7% per transaction <---- My current paypal is 2.4% because I do more than 10,000/month in recieving transactions
$0.35 per transaction <--- 0.29 for paypal
$20 monthly fee <--- $0 for paypal
no setup fees on either one.

plus I use the paypal debit card to purchase the products so I get 1% cash back. So I only end up only paying 1.4% per transaction.

[southplatte]

That's what I have found - plus like I said with their new programs you have a seemless integration opportunity to custom program your own payment pages and interface with them just as you would a regular merchant account, because in effect that what their new service is.

[jestep]

Originally Posted by Deliguy

Whats weird is everyone keeps telling me paypal is the expensive route, but I'm finding them the cheapest.
On my research I found:
2.7% per transaction <---- My current paypal is 2.4% because I do more than 10,000/month in recieving transactions
$0.35 per transaction <--- 0.29 for paypal
$20 monthly fee <--- $0 for paypal
no setup fees on either one.

plus I use the paypal debit card to purchase the products so I get 1% cash back. So I only end up only paying 1.4% per transaction.

I think paypal is a very affordable payment solution. You can find a merchant account in the 2.10 - 2.15 % range and $.25 - $.30 / transaction. A merchant account will almost always have a monthly statement fee and a payment gateway fee which is where paypal makes grounds. Paypal does have the 1% cash back debit card, but if you talk to most people that have run into problems with paypal, they will tell you not to keep a balance in your paypal account. The main issues I personally see with paypal is one of convenience and trust.

I think that a business looks much more professional by hosting everything on their own site. Paypal payments pro is available but it is tricky to get it to work properly unless you have a shopping cart system with a well developed module.

[bwn]

By using paply only is not good business but really risky as they are not trustworty and most people dont like to use paypal. if you are doing 10,000 a month through paypal by getting a merchant account "like any good business should" you will triple your income and keep paypal as a secondary provider. Paypl is just to untrustworth for me to use them other than a secondary processor.