PayPal Payment Method For your Online Optical Store. The Good The Bad and The Ugly

16 January 2015

We briefly touched on all payment methods that you can use for your online optical store. With LiveOptical you have unlimited choices. You can take Credit Card, PayPal, Cash or Check. This article will focus on PayPal as it is one of the most popular payment methods for a starter online optical. PayPal has the most benefits and the most dark sides. You need to be aware of all.

Good

When you just open an online optical store, you will find that the easiest method to set up and get paid is PayPal. It only takes a few minutes to set up a PayPal account. There is no sign up fee. You can start taking money right away.

PayPal will electronically verify your checking account by taking a few cents and asking you to tell how much it was. Verification itself will take a few days because your bank may have a delay in showing the transaction to you. But you can make sales and take money on your website even before your checking account is verified. All the money will get deposited to your PayPal account first. Once your account is verified you can move the money from your PayPal account to your checking account with one click.

Another great benefit of PayPal is that it can accept Visa and Master Card. The customer can use their credit card to pay on your PayPal screen without having their own PayPal account. So with PayPal you can accept most of credit cards too.

PayPal is one of the most cost effective payment methods. There is no sign up fee. There is no monthly fee. There is only transaction percentage of 2.9% plus $0.30 transaction fee, which is similar to credit cards. There are even more savings in case you need to refund a customer. In case of refund that 2.9% will be returned to you. When you accept credit card, the 2.9% will not be returned to you even if you had to refund your customer. And with expensive items such as eyeglasses a sale of a few hundred dollars will result in $10 transaction fee eaten up each refund.

Bad

The problem of PayPal is that many online shoppers don’t have PayPal account and they don’t know that they can pay with a credit card on your PayPal screen. When such people see PayPal they automatically assume that you want them to pay with their PayPal account. Some people get nervous and may buy from someone else who accepts credit card directly. You can put a message on your website telling your customers that they can pay with credit cards and explain that all customer needs do is to click Pay.

Ugly

PayPal pissed a lot of people off. And forgive my French, but word “pissed” is the best way to describe it. PayPal is not regulated in the same way as banks and plays by its own rules. They can freeze, and often do freeze, accounts along with entire balance for 6 months and up. Read more about such case here: http://www.cnet.com/news/paypal-exec-gets-personally-involved-in-account-dispute/ There are thousands of similar stories on Internet. Just type in Google “PayPal froze my account”.  This has happened to one of our LiveOptical customer as well just because he tried to test the website and paid $10 for a pair of eyeglasses that PayPal deemed too cheap, thus scam. Our customer was unable to reach them and explain that he was just testing and used his own credit card to pay, which he refunded right away. They usually will not even explain why the account is frozen. You will get a message saying your money are frozen and we will hold it for 6 months. Call it unfair, call it theft, but this is what’s happening. All it can be is your competitor call them and tell that you did something wrong with your website such as verbally told them of a special service or set a different price. Million ways to screw your PayPal account. If your website is relatively busy, you will have to quickly rush to open a credit card gateway account which can take weeks. Not only your money will be locked, and PayPal does not understand that you need to pay your suppliers too, but you will also be losing an opportunity costs by lost sales.

You are never secure with PayPal and we highly recommend to login to your PayPal account right after you had a sale and deposit the money to your account to keep the balance as low as possible.

PayPal froze tens of thousands of accounts from many eBay shoppers too, again never explaining. All it takes is a merchant to complain about shoppers to kill their PayPal. Many people detest PayPal so much that will not want to use it even with their credit card.

Conclusion

PayPal is a great way to get started with your LiveOptical store, but add a credit card payment option as soon as makes sense to you. Not everyone has a PayPal account, but everyone has a credit card.