Paypal ?
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| source: https://3dprint.com/159318/prusa-paypal-service-problems/ |
Paypal lured me in with a "free" $5 deposit in my account. As I recall there was also a competitor called Payplace that gave $10 to new accounts. But Paypal took over fairly quickly, maybe due to Ebay ?
Anyway this entry kind of goes along with a previous blog entry on DX sales. In 2021 I finally stopped accepting Paypal for almost all orders. It was a combination of things that prompted the change (in no particular order):
1) DX sales: I had already stopped DX sales which really do require something like Paypal. People don't mail "green stamps" like they used to. So no DX sales means less reason for Paypal.
2) rates/fee increases: Paypal raised both the per transaction fee AND the percentage of sales taken in 2021. And over the years Paypal has changed things so that the seller pays a fee anytime someone completes a transaction, even if a partial refund is done - when it started Paypal wouldn't charge the fee if a refund was done.
3) Paypal is just hard to use at times. For example, last year I got a transaction put on hold by a somewhat hysterical customer. He was unable to contact me via the contact email that Paypal provided him (he apparently didn't see the contact email on the web site):
The problem with the Paypal contact email was because it was the ATT worldnet address I had provided (see 4-19 blog entry) all those years ago when I first started using Paypal. There was no simple way to change this - I did Paypal site searches, I scrubbed all mentions of ATT emails but I was unable to find and change the contact email.
I refunded this customers payment (I still had to pay Paypal the fees on the transaction though). I finally was able to change the contact email but it took a lot of time to find: Paypal can be hard to use.
4) And those customer holds: a customer can open a case on a transaction and Paypal immediately puts a hold on the funds. In the case of the hysterical customer above I could see a flurry of emails from Paypal telling me of the transaction and then that the funds were on hold. I also had a customer in NZ who put a hold on a transaction even though he knew beforehand that there would be extended delays due to the pandemic (which there were).
5) More and more mouse clicks were required as time went on: For a while there Paypal was pestering me with capcha at every login - I've only got so many mouse clicks left in these knarly fingers, why all the capcha stuff, Paypal ? Also Paypal changed their shipping to Shipstation, the result was more clicks. Doing this once in a while, no big deal, but do it multiple times every business day, all those clicks add up. The Paypal people never consider this when they make changes: make a change and then use the changed site 300 times and you'll have a different viewpoint, Paypal
The point here is not to dump on customers, although there are a few who just aren't worth the trouble. Or even to dump on Paypal. The point is that Paypal just wasn't a good deal for me anymore. I realize that it offers customers a lot of convenience, confidence and speed. But I don't sell kits to make huge sums of money, I do it for fun, it's a hobby. Paypal was making it less fun to sell kits so I'll live with lower sales from now on.
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm