PayPal saves the day!

If you're a small business looking to trade online and accept credit card payments, PayPal offers the ideal solution...

As with all our Articles, we welcome your comments and we'll be making updates to this article based on your feedback and our own ongoing research.

What is PayPal?

PayPal is an online e-commerce provider that is ideally suited for small businesses, online merchants, individuals and others currently under-served by traditional payment mechanisms.

PayPal is perhaps best known as the e-commerce solution used by eBay and now has almost 90 million accounts worldwide!

What do PayPal provide?

PayPal provide a wide range of services, but most notably – as far as we were concerned – they enable:

• Online credit card payments
• Online donations (useful for the free Confluence plugins that we provide)
• Online shopping baskets

Why use PayPal?

When Adaptavist first started trading, the banks in the UK were less than cooperative – until a company in the UK is more than 2 years old, options for online trading are virtually none existent, unless the majority of revenues are spent on extremely high bank charges and fees.

As such, Adaptavist began the long and painful search for a solution that allowed us to trade online. Having spent over 4 months trying to get a solution from virtually every UK bank, we decided to give PayPal a try...

Compare these fees to those charged by your bank:

Within 30 minutes of visiting their website, we were able to take credit card payments online – something the UK banks would not have even considered providing for almost another 2 years!

Unlike the banks here in the UK, and in many other countries as we've been finding out from our clients, PayPal are aware of one very important fact: Customers are important!

As our business has grown, we've continued to use PayPal because it's still far cheaper than any other e-commerce service – that allows us to keep our prices really low and ensures we remain extremely competitive!

How did PayPal affect our business?

Suddenly, we were able to sell to 56 countries worldwide in multiple currencies. This instantly changed our business from a small UK-only company to a global player.

Clients are able to pay in their own currency in most cases and PayPal automatically converts the transaction to our preferred currency.

Although trading through PayPal is really easy, our bookkeeping became more complex due to having multiple currencies and cross-referencing PayPal transactions with funds transfers to our bank was initially quite daunting.

Unlike our bank, PayPal doesn't sleep at weekends and it doesn't have "bank holidays". This allows us to easily cope with clients in different time-zones and because transactions are almost instant it's been superb for our cash-flow.

Sounds too good to be true?

There are a few downsides...

When we first started using PayPal, customers had to have their own PayPal account before they could send money to us. This was a real pain as it made selling to corporate clients almost impossible. But this problem was short lived...

PayPal extended their service, at no extra cost, to allow credit card transactions to be made without needing a PayPal account – suddenly anyone could pay us using almost any credit card, debit card or, if they preferred, their own PayPal account.

One of the minor issues we encounter every so often is caused by corporate clients who have used their work email address to create a personal PayPal account – they can't pay using their company credit card. There is a fairly simple solution to this: Just get someone else within the company to make the payment.

PayPal's fraud prevention is free because it works really well. The downside is that clients sometimes have to enter more information to prove that they are they are authorised to use their credit card.

The PayPal shopping basket can only deal with one currency at a time which is a problem for us. Because we sell Confluence in US Dollars ($ USD) and our Builder theme and Host service are sold in Sterling (£ GBP), clients have to buy Confluence separately from our other products and services. We're working on our own shopping basket to solve this problem (see "The Future below).

And, finally, the PayPal online payments site is pretty ugly. Although it works like a charm, there aren't any options to make it look identical to our website.

How does it affect our clients?

We get many requests to add shopping baskets to company websites or donation facilities to non-profit websites and PayPal has become the logical choice for accomplishing this. One of our most frequently used company mantras is If it didn't work for us, we wouldn't sell it to you! – almost all our transactions are carried out through PayPal and as such we consider it to be reliable, if not essential, for our business and that of our clients.

Important Note As per Atlassian's licensing of Confluence, you can only generate revenues if you are using a commercial license – you can't use a personal or non-profit license of Confluence to make money. If you need a commercial license, we offer attractive discounts - for more details, see our Confluence - Price List.

Want to know more?

The best place to find more information is obviously PayPal's website:

The Future

Having recently incorporated PayPal's own shopping basket in to our website, we've found a few key issues that impair the buying experience ¹ :

• It can only deal in one currency at a time
• There's no way to see prices in your own currency
• You can't simply request a quote or store a shopping basket for later purchase
• You have to buy various products and services from different parts of our website

Footnotes

Reference	Notes
1	The list shown isn't exhaustive, however it covers the main things we want to improve.

As such, we're now developing a shopping basket plugin for Confluence! Based around a set of macros, it should allow us to not only enhance our own site with a vastly improved shopping experience, but also enable our clients to add flexible shopping features to their own sites.