I wanted to make this post because I have some very strong feelings about PayPal. PayPal is not the best solution for purchasing things online for a lot of reasons, most notably, the fact that they are not a bank of any kind and as such, are not held to the same standards or regulations that a regular bank would be. There have been many stories (in the tens of thousands) of people's PayPal accounts being frozen for months and months and in some cases, people completely losing many thousands of dollars to the PayPal system with no recourse whatsoever.
I have a friend who used to sell items on eBay and used the PayPal system. Without going into details or naming names, I will tell you they froze his assets (over $2000) for 6 months. He never did get any real explanation as to why. The current consensus is PayPal moves SO MUCH money that they regularly find ways to sit on yours and collect the interest. He no longer uses PayPal for obvious reasons and his comment now is that anyone selling things on the internet should ONLY be dealing with a merchant account from a real bank for processing credit cards. That's the only way you are afforded any protection on the internet and from companies like PayPal.
I noticed that my Dolphin 7 has PayPal built into it and it's a very easy thing to get setup. In fact, in my opinion, it's far too easy. Nothing good ever comes easy. I would very much like to see an alternative to PayPal created for Dolphin as I believe Dolphin is doing a disservice to it's membership by having PayPal as the only way to do financial transactions within it's community setup.
You know the old saying, Where's there's smoke, there is most certainly fire. If you don't think this is a real issue just Google 'PayPal Complaints'. You will find page after page after website of tens of thousands of complaints and stories. Even if most of them are bogus or inflated, the sheer volume of them should give you cause for concern.
Why can't we get them to ban attorneys from buying stuff? Now that would be useful to the world.
Now if we could just get paypal to verify that Attorneys are ethical.
CC Processing varies from bank to bank, you can't really integrate one until you know who the gateway bank is, as you need certain items from them to make it work. However, we have SWREG, CCBill, Moneybookers, PPPay and so many others out there. In the end, it's a smart move to have multiple payment venues available to your members so they can conduct business with you without any unneccesary hold ups.
Its a european law that they don't may accept transitions from adult sites and pokersites also. Thats the information I have.
Its a european law that they don't may accept transitions from adult sites and pokersites also. Thats the information I have.
My 2 Cents
I am not a big fan of credit anyway. I have never actually had a real credit card and have found many alternative ways to live my life without it. On the other hand, the world currently revolves around the idea of play now, pay later and in order for me to prosper I am forced into accomodating those that do. My company generates about $100,000 in receipts each month with a very large portion coming from credit cards so even though I do not personally use credit, I need to look at the best possible ways to accomodate them..
Having said that, I have never setup an 'online' store before. I see in my Dolphin that the only optiion that is pre-programmed into the software is PayPal. My thought is to figure a way so Dolphin can set itself up so we can incorporate our own merchant accounts so the payments we recieve for our sales are not handed off to a third party. When I sell something, I want my money now, not 2 weeks or even 6 months (and sometimes never) down the road. No competent business can operate that way.
I have no idea how to accomplish this task but it seems to me that all banking transactions involving credit cards are essentially the same. It shouldn't be that big of a leap to create a generic & secure credit card processing page that collects all the data necessary to process the payment through our own banks and somehow make that page part of the store system and make it fully configurable so our members and ourselves can meet the needs of our individual institutions. I am sure most banks would love nothing better than to get PayPal out of their hair.