Alternative to Paypal....Google Wallet?

[ZF Lee]

I might have some sales coming in, so I went to apply for a paypal account....and ran into a long messy tirade of browser mismanagement and email crap.

Long story short, I discovered that I did try to open a paypal account years ago (for running away lol-I just hated living in the Slowlane, but didn't know what to call it or how to run away theproper way)...and it somehow got tied with my parents' email. I'm not going to ask them to reset things so that I can have my own account.....my Fastlane is private and they would bitch-slap me into the Slowlane if they knew of it.

Do me a favour and don't tell them.

I decided to look out for alternative online transaction tools and found Google Wallet.
Looks user-friendly and good, but does anyone here has experience using it?
Is it compatible with your online business?
Or do you use other online transaction tools?
Or do you love paypal?

 

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[Growth & Learn]

I might have some sales coming in, so I went to apply for a paypal account....and ran into a long messy tirade of browser mismanagement and email crap.

Long story short, I discovered that I did try to open a paypal account years ago (for running away lol-I just hated living in the Slowlane, but didn't know what to call it or how to run away theproper way)...and it somehow got tied with my parents' email. I'm not going to ask them to reset things so that I can have my own account.....my Fastlane is private and they would bitch-slap me into the Slowlane if they knew of it.

Do me a favour and don't tell them.

I decided to look out for alternative online transaction tools and found Google Wallet.
Looks user-friendly and good, but does anyone here has experience using it?
Is it compatible with your online business?
Or do you use other online transaction tools?
Or do you love paypal?

Let me get this straight...you have to ask your parent's permission to do reset an email? Man up and just ask them. Dude....

Google Wallet is legit. Not many people use it though so you won't get high conversions.

 

[ZF Lee]

Let me get this straight...you have to ask your parent's permission to do reset an email? Man up and just ask them. Dude....

Google Wallet is legit. Not many people use it though so you won't get high conversions.

I would love to man up and ask them,but it's like asking a prison warden to hand you the keys so you can escape.

But I'll look back into paypal if the conversions are really that of a pain. Thanks.
I'll have to tell those Slowlaners I'm making a decision rather than asking for their opinion.

 

[GSF]

Can't you just setup a new PayPal with a different email? You're allowed 2 PayPal accounts, 1 personal and 1 business

 

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[ZF Lee]

Can't you just setup a new PayPal with a different email? You're allowed 2 PayPal accounts, 1 personal and 1 business

Will look into that too....provided that gmail will allow me to make two emails.
thanks

 

[OverByte]

Depends on how your site is built and what you are looking for (buy now vs recurring subscriptions). I found paypal to be a huge pain in the a$$ for implementing recurring subscriptions and in general I had a poor experience with it.

3 things to note:

1. Paypals documentation is garbage. They offer too many things, buy now button, rest api, braintree v0 api, express.. blah, blah, you'll be overwhelmed with information in no time and it's poorly organized.
2. Last I checked Paypal retains all your users credit card info and won't let you export it, so if you have recurring payments lined up and you want to switch to another merchant account you have to ask all your customers for their info agin. No thanks!
3. Finally, I don't like the whole offloading the customer to the paypal site before being redirected back to your thank you page. I think it looks less professional. Even if they offer guest checkout, I feel this is suboptimal behaviour for the buyer. And a big final note on this one is if you have recurring payments (like subscriptions) you may have the user redirected back to your site before you get a response from paypal indicating whether the payment was successful (in my opinion just BS you shoudn't need to deal with).

My recommendation is Stripe. I just implemented it, it was very easy, their documentation is excellent and they dont have any of the problems I just mentioned with Paypal. They also offer an ingenius solution to allow you to take credit card information on your site (ie not redirecting like paypal) without needing your site to be PCI compliant.

Note: Stripe also offers a simple "buy now" type integration similar to paypals but again I feel looks much more professional. It pops up a window on top of your page and takes the credit card info, when it's done it tells you whether it is successful and just dismisses the popup.

 

[ZF Lee]

Depends on how your site is built and what you are looking for (buy now vs recurring subscriptions). I found paypal to be a huge pain in the a$$ for implementing recurring subscriptions and in general I had a poor experience with it.

3 things to note:

1. Paypals documentation is garbage. They offer too many things, buy now button, rest api, braintree v0 api, express.. blah, blah, you'll be overwhelmed with information in no time and it's poorly organized.
2. Last I checked Paypal retains all your users credit card info and won't let you export it, so if you have recurring payments lined up and you want to switch to another merchant account you have to ask all your customers for their info agin. No thanks!
3. Finally, I don't like the whole offloading the customer to the paypal site before being redirected back to your thank you page. I think it looks less professional. Even if they offer guest checkout, I feel this is suboptimal behaviour for the buyer. And a big final note on this one is if you have recurring payments (like subscriptions) you may have the user redirected back to your site before you get a response from paypal indicating whether the payment was successful (in my opinion just BS you shoudn't need to deal with).

My recommendation is Stripe. I just implemented it, it was very easy, their documentation is excellent and they dont have any of the problems I just mentioned with Paypal. They also offer an ingenius solution to allow you to take credit card information on your site (ie not redirecting like paypal) without needing your site to be PCI compliant.

Note: Stripe also offers a simple "buy now" type integration similar to paypals but again I feel looks much more professional. It pops up a window on top of your page and takes the credit card info, when it's done it tells you whether it is successful and just dismisses the popup.

Thanks. It's true that paypal can sometimes be a pain in the a$$.
I spotted a few blogs saying how paypal was a money stealer rather than a value giver.
If it really does overhaul many problems of paypal, I'll get it. Thanks.

 

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[applesack]

Google Wallet [crickets] ...no one uses it.
PayPal, @GSF is right, you can open one for your business... incorporate or llc or whatever you need to do. You can get a new account that way. Even though @OverByte is right, "...in general I had a poor experience with it" (who doesn't), PayPal is pretty much a necessity (enormous user base) especially if you sell on eBay.

The best way to approach PayPal, in my opinion, is to use BraintreePayments. PayPal bought Braintree in 2015 (I think) and they are the genius that PayPal never was. They have very smooth recurring billing, a brilliant little js dropin for small sites, and are extremely easy to work with. Oh, and when you use Braintree, PayPal is built right in... very nice.

Stripe ditto all that @OverByte said... Strip is a fantastic service.

Amazon Hard to implement, but the people that like to checkout with Amazon are big buyers. I always recommend implementing "Checkout by Amazon"

 

[ZF Lee]

Google Wallet [crickets] ...no one uses it.
PayPal, @GSF is right, you can open one for your business... incorporate or llc or whatever you need to do. You can get a new account that way. Even though @OverByte is right, "...in general I had a poor experience with it" (who doesn't), PayPal is pretty much a necessity (enormous user base) especially if you sell on eBay.

The best way to approach PayPal, in my opinion, is to use BraintreePayments. PayPal bought Braintree in 2015 (I think) and they are the genius that PayPal never was. They have very smooth recurring billing, a brilliant little js dropin for small sites, and are extremely easy to work with. Oh, and when you use Braintree, PayPal is built right in... very nice.

Stripe ditto all that @OverByte said... Strip is a fantastic service.

Amazon Hard to implement, but the people that like to checkout with Amazon are big buyers. I always recommend implementing "Checkout by Amazon"

I don't plan on using ebay or amazon (yet)...I'm going to build my own platform and add a plugin.
Braintree...never heard of it. But since most people use paypal anyway, it might have an overbearing factor over Stripe. But thanks for the info.

 

[applesack]

I don't plan on using ebay or amazon (yet)...

Right, but you can implement more than one payment method. Although I do encourage starting with a single method (don't kill yourself on startup), I also encourage every e-commerce site to include PayPal, Amazon, and standard Visa MC Discover AMEX.

 

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