Currently, we are evaluating whether to offer PayPal as an option to our customers.
There was a time when PayPal was seen as a sort of online ‘wallet’ where people stored cash they had acquired from selling items (usually on ebay) and would then spend this cash on other things. Part of the pitch was that by not offering PayPal we were excluding customers who did not have (or wish to use) credit cards online.
Nowadays things are different. While there are still people who spend ‘cash’ from their PayPal account, the vast majority simply enter their credit card details and use PayPal as a card processing service. How can we be so sure of this? One of our sister companies handles all the back end processing for a major games download site. That site offers PayPal and over 90% of PayPal transactions are simple credit card purchases that could have been made via the site.
So, what’s the problem? It sounds like people use PayPal because they trust it. What’s not to like?
The drawbacks that we can see are:
1) PayPal is simply more expensive. That’s not a problem for the customer, obviously, but is a fact of life and you can’t really pass this cost on to the customer.
2) Just Flight has a long established customer account structure that includes a loyalty point scheme, address storage details and so on. This is a nightmare to integrate with PayPal because the customer leaves our site, makes his payment and then returns and there is nothing ‘joined up’ about the process. We would probably have to ditch accounts and reward points for PayPal users.
3) Following on from 2), PayPal takes your money and pays us before the purchase is completed. If anything goes wrong after you return to the site to complete the purchase your cash has gone but we don’t have your order.
4) Customer service. If anything goes wrong you know you can contact us straight away and we will resolve it. We have well established guarantees and we stick to them. If necessary, we will call you on the telephone, irrespective of where you are in the world to sort something out and if you e-mail us we won’t send you an automated reply based on a scan of your e-mail that looks for keywords and shoves in what is deemed to be an appropriate response.
5) There is very little seller protection on PayPal. If we process a credit card we can use Verified by Visa and, if there’s a problem, we can take it up with the fraud department at the card processing end. No such luxury with PayPal.
We will more than likely offer PayPal as a payment option in the near future, but it will probably be limited to verified PayPal accounts, which may limit the number of people who can actually use it.
As ever, we’d appreciate any feedback or comments you have on the above and if anyone can tell us why Amazon don’t use PayPal we’d be very interested!
The reason you can’t register an account without a card is simply because we work on the simple logic of why would someone want to open an account without buying something? We used to allow people to open accounts ‘on the fly’ in the past and we ended up with a vast database of non-customers who were opening accounts simply to get e-mail and news information. You can now sign up for news without opening an account, which we think makes things a lot easier for customers.
