PayPal

PayPal is used both by consumers and business owners. As a consumer, you use it like a digital wallet for making online payments and purchasing products or services. A business owner uses PayPal's merchant services for collecting payment from its customers. All you need is an email address in order to signup for PayPal account. You can then setup your profile as an Individual or Business. For accepting and making payments, you can link your credit card, debit card or bank account. Most businesses and freelancers use PayPal’s invoicing features for collecting payments. If you accept credit cards for payments, with PayPal Express Checkout you can offer your customers an alternative payment option. If you do not want your customers to leave your website and handle the complete transaction process on your website, you can opt for the Payment Pro version. You can also accept micropayments and subscription payments. PayPal's popularity rose due to its integration with eBay and now every major e-commerce solutions like Shopify, Magento, 3dcart etc. provides seamless integration with PayPal. It's "PayPal Credit" feature (formerly Bill me Later) lets you offer no-interest financing to your customers.

PayPal is marred by controversies and if you do a Google Search for PayPal complaints you will have enough data to read for rest of the year. The most common complaint levied against PayPal is its attitude towards fraud detection. If your account experiences a sudden influx of credits you will be having nightmares about PayPal freezing your account. Because that is what you have been hearing. I would always advise using PayPal as an alternative rather than a first choice option for payment collection. Another area of pain for businesses is the ease with which a buyer can raise a dispute and get refunds for payments. PayPal is naturally favored by buyers because of this, however, for a seller, this is another nightmare waiting to happen. If you do not respond to a claim within a specific time period PayPal will settle in favor of the buyer.

PayPal offers business an easy to setup solution for payment collection. It is widely used and you are not restricted to just collect payments using credit cards. It has lots of features for advanced users and is easily integrated with your favorite e-commerce solution as well. The transaction fees may be higher than other solutions but the reach of PayPal is far more than any of its competition. If you are looking for an alternative solution to present to your customers for collecting payment, then PayPal is definitely a must have.