Written by Cyn
With the launch of Checkout by Amazon I have to ask myself – is there such a thing as too many payment options? When a buyer comes to my site, what are they looking for as far as payment options? Currently I offer Paypal, Google Checkout and a merchant account. 50% of my shoppers choose the merchant account, 25% Paypal and 25% Google Checkout.
Would I not be shooting myself in the foot by adding another payment option? Considering each payment processor offers reduced fees based on volume, by having too many options, and spreading that volume among 3 processors, I am paying higher processing costs.
When I only offered Paypal, I had a lot of abandoned shopping carts and even a few potential customers email me that they canceled their order because they couldn’t use their credit card directly. So I’ve added a merchant account and have had no more abandoned carts. I may even experiment with deleting Paypal and Google Checkout for a month. See if I get any requests for them, or if my abandoned carts return. If I were to process all payments through my merchant account, I could save quite a bit of money on processing fees with the reduced percentages.
So for me, Amazon Checkout is a non-event. Too many hands in the pie.
August 10th, 2008
I logged into my Vendio account today to find a message from Vendio alerting sellers that this Monday eBay will be expanding support for Paypal Payment Reviews on eBay transactions. Vendio states that now more eBay payments made through Paypal will be reviewed to determine if they are high risk (Vendio is estimating the total will be well under 10%). If Paypal determines a payment is high risk they will place a hold on the funds and notify the seller not to ship while they review the payment.
Reading the Paypal link containing the information, Paypal states that the seller will be notified “within minutes” of payment via email, as well as flags put in your Account Overview and History Pages. I would recommend not relying on email and check your Paypal account throughout the day for these “flags” or even delaying shipment by a day on high value items.
Click here to read the Paypal information on Payment Review.
Cyn
March 25th, 2008
eBay announced today a new checkout flow for Paypal payments. The response from the community has not been positive as it apparently leaves their Paypal account open at the end, among other glitches. There are also reports of the order showing the shipping for each item, rather than one shipping charge for the entire order.
You can read the official eBay announcement here.
Reviewing the screenshots posted by Paypal on the Checkout Forum I am happy to see on the checkout page an explanation of what an echeck is, with an estimated clearing date, and a note that it may delay shipping. However, there have been problems reported with trying to use other funding methods and being automatically moved to an echeck instead.
This is interesting since I have received an unusual number of echecks today. I wonder if the new checkout has anything to do with it? Has Paypal found another way to force buyers to use their bank accounts rather than credit cards, thereby saving Paypal money?
Some buyers are unhappy with the new automatic default to Pay Multiple Sellers. This may delay payment from buyers as they wait for other auctions to end so they can pay all sellers at once.
Other buyers are reporting changing their funding method to credit card and not being able to proceed with payment.
Another change eBay is rolling out full of bugs.
Click here to read the eBay Checkout board and Paypal’s explanation.
Cyn
March 13th, 2008