PayPal

Paypal the very popular online payments vendor has come along way in terms of the simplicity and user friendliness in your account. I recall writing to Paypal one day a few years ago to say thanks for making it easier to send and receive payments around the world but also to please redesign your website with a list of useful items to help make it easier to navigate. About a year or so ago I believe Paypal had a massive overhaul finally that makes it so much simpler to use their website and payment services. I've used Paypal in a few different ways and have had no issues in the software itself other than the older website. It's been invaluable for buying online with thousands of purchases made using it. I've also sold items via Paypal including one time purchases and recurring revenue. It's been useful with my clients and I've both linked products to purchase on the Paypal site as well as custom coded Paypal Payments Pro directly into a client website securely with a SSL certificate enabling their customers to make purchases using Paypal right from their website shopping cart. It worked great and still makes them a lot of revenue to this day. There are lot of competitors but Paypal has made it easiest to integrate a payment system into a CMS such as Wordpress or Joomla. The fact that Ebay owns Paypal makes it a trustworthy brand. No company is yet 100% secure from cyber crime but I would trust a large enterprise such as Ebay before many others in terms of security.

I've heard countless times of Paypal merchants having there payments held and frozen unable to access their earnings usually because of receiving too many payments to quickly which can happen frequently in the internet marketing industry for example as there are lot of product launches. I've come by in my research ways to help prevent or minimize this risk but it's not cool to see screenshots from people you trust with over $50,000 withheld by Paypal because they are too successful. If you're doing high volume or revenue I would definitely take a long look around the market for the best rates. I know that Paypal seems too pricey for some successful product vendors and the risk of having funds withheld adds to the need for this due diligence. Paypal is so popular that it makes it a real target for phishing and email scams. I've experienced this at least six or seven times now. So much so that I recognize it instantly and relay the scam to the appropriate paypal department. If you sell items on Craigslist or Kijiji it's been my experience that clever scammers will attempt to purchase your item but state they are in the military or away for some other reason, and then provide you directions to have a middle man pick up your item, and help transfer the funds. Most fake Paypal emails I've received have been easy to spot, but the first to attempt this scam on me were able to use paypal.com in their domain somehow which was tricky. There was still enough other clues to not follow up with these people again and Paypal confirmed it was indeed a phishing scam and were thankful I reported it.

For those who are new to selling online Paypal is the easiest to integrate. You could be selling products from a website nowadays using Paypal, Wix or Wordpress and Woocommerce for example within a day or so, even if you're a newbie to the entire process. And it's possible to setup products for sale within a few minutes if you have some experience in the area. I'm grateful to this company for having a business model with no upfront costs. It allowed me initially as a start up to begin selling products online very quickly. And my clients products and services as well. The easy integration into Wordpress is my favorite aspect about it. And nowadays I find linking to the Paypal site when taking payments to be perceived as more trusted then taking payments on your own website even if it is secured using SSL. The trust in the brand allows me to close deals quicker because my merchant account isn't questioned by clients or customers and payments are transferred without issue.