I am going to be using Paypal for my big product launch and I am very unhappy that I have to do so. But that's life.

ETA: Already using Stripe for Internet transactions when I can, obviously. And Square for IRL ones.

interesting topic... fwiw, I just did a quick look through the sales data for SnG Solver and can report that ~36% purchased with PayPal. Before I looked, I didnt think it would be that high, but there you go.

Of course I have no idea how many people would have been able to pay with another method, but to not accept PayPal seems like it would be a mistake to me.

This is us too.

I'm definitely not as familiar with B2C - but it probably depends on your customer demographics as well. For example older and less technologically savy users probably use CC much more often than paypal.

I'd love to see data on this, but I'm skeptical that most companies would have 35% of their customers requiring paypal.

Paypal also offers CC support and the buyer doesn't need to setup a Paypal account. The seller also doesn't have to pay any monthly fees or use a paid for Paypal package, they just lose a small cut.

The only annoying thing is a lot of people don't know that so you usually need some type of helper text explaining that you can make a CC payment without Paypal while still using Paypal. This holds mostly true for when you have the free Paypal version which doesn't allow you to customize the payment form.

If that number held true in the days of the rakeback grinding glory days, then I wouldn't be surprised if the real number is much higher. My RB provider stopped offering Pay Pal in 2010 or so. In those days, my Pay Pal effectively was my debit and credit card. Just a matter of how many people opted to use the 16 digit number.

I'm not saying to not use Pay Pal, I'm just saying that comparing their fees to a bona fide payment processor isnt fair, and I'm strongly advising against using them exclusively for your payments over what I believe is a misconception on price.

I'm also stating a case of how bad they suck too, but sometimes you have to dance with the devil if that is what it takes to make the money roll.

I think we suffer a bit from the dreaded Curse of Knowledge ITT. PayPal is actually a fairly strong brand name when it comes to payment and most customers are not aware of fraud and so forth. In fact I'd say many would concider PayPal safer than anything else just because they have heard the name before etc.

Basically I'd say the association most people have with PayPal is "easy to pay online+ebay". I would 100% offer paypal if I had an online payment site. I'm still rooting for Stripe.

Random additional food for thought: In Germany CCs are actually fairly uncommon. My PayPal is hooked up to my bank account as is the one of most people I know (who often don't even own a CC). I have no idea if it's different in other countries (CCs seemed more widespread in France and were everywhere in the US). So over here PayPal tends to be seen as a layer that allows you to use your bank account to pay online (on some sites like Amazon you can do it directly which is what most people do)

I think a lot of us also come from very different backgrounds. I'm use to B2B businesses (where non-CC PayPal isn't even a serious option) and older demographics (where most of us don't even have a PayPal account).

Edit: Older in a technology sense - so like 30. I also hang out with a lot of non-technologically savy people in real life.

Paypal I could never recommend to anyone, having dealt with having my money held up for months.

Better than nothing if you have no alternative, but there are options now.

If anyone can help with this random question:
I'm using User32.dll to get raw input from usb devices and intercepting the WndProc messages that are WM_INPUT messages. My problem is that these devices are not sending NAK's (in usb, "...a NAK packet indicating to the host that the endpoint is working, but temporarily has no data to send"). Or maybe they are but I cant seem to find how to get ahold of those messages. Any ideas?

Paypal B2B is a big joke obviously; Stripe or any other merchant account is obviously preferred.

But there's been a bunch of studies done on B2C (most notably patio11's stuff on Hacker News, he does the Bingo Card Creator stuff - his book is really good BTW) that shows that not having Paypal as an option while you have just CC processing causes conversions to drop pretty significantly. That's why I will offer it begrudgingly.

Also, thoughts on ASP.NET? Is it popular? Useful to know? etc?

So Paypal is like playing on AP was for a while there. It's the soft game with the risk of getting robbed.

haha.

From the consumer end of things, I tend to use paypal to make random purchases a lot. It's basically like 1-click amazon purchases, but on random other sites. login/passwords are saved, I just have to start typing my email and autocomplete to make a payment. Comparing that with having to often make an account on some shopping site (this is often required for paypal too mind), then fetch card, enter annoying digits, flip over card, enter annoying extra digits, wait for "verified by visa" redirect thing, enter even more annoying digits... I often won't bother - or at least an impulse purchase is analyzed rather more thoroughly to decide if I can really be bothered.

That and paypal's consumer protection is faaaar nicer than dealing with a UK bank / credit card company if there is some form of dispute required

Agree, I buy with Paypal frequently for that reason.

how are you guys not using roboform / lastpass or some other password manager/formfiller?

^bump

yeah

probably, but not via a webapp (imagine the abuse). sounds like you'll need client-side software. java or flash might work i guess?

My PayPal account balance has mostly been 0. Am I using it wrong? I don't even see how my account could get locked.

It's basically just a software layer that takes money from my bank account and sends it to a sellers bank account. I guess the one case where I could see an account lock would be sending fantasy money to someone shady or smth. but even then I'd lose ~0$. Would be annoying though but I don't get the AP comparison at all.

fyp if you're a vendor accepting paypal, it is in this case that your balance is usually > 0 and there is danger of random locking.

Ok that makes some sense dave

I take it it's due to cost that people keep money in there i.e. it's less expensive to transfer to account once a month than ASAP?

Only some sense. Sorry, let me fix that then:

lol

I'm pretty sure NAKs are handled at the hardware or driver level. I don't think you will see them at the application level. You should only get a message when there is data ready to be read.

You will need a proper USB hardware analyser like the Ellisys analyser if you want to see NAKs from the device. If you don't have a USB analyser then you could try USBLyzer. It's a "software only" option but I don't know how deep you can dig with it.

Is there a reason you need to see the NAKs?