PayPal Payment Button - Does it make e-commerce application less reputable?

Question

This is meant to be a subjective question on whether or not the PayPal Payment Button is considered a "hobby"-level feature in an otherwise professional e-commerce web application.

Personally, I tend to cringe a little when I go to buy something and see a PayPal button in place of an in-house shopping cart. On the other hand, I'm sure my data is a lot safer with PayPal than with a lot of self-hosted services.

Is this a legitimate UI reputability concern, or am I an e-commerce developer snob? Would you worry about this in your applications?

Answer 1

Personally I don't have a problem with it. Unless you are a huge name business people are going to trust paypal/google checkout more than a custom solution. Beyond that assuming the responsibility for handling the necessary security precautions isn't reasonable for a lot of small to mid-size businesses.

Answer 2

I recently decided, for personal reasons, to cut up my check card and go back to the strictly ATM card method. I have a credit card I can use for online purchases, but I prefer paying for things out of pocket over worrying about interest rates and whatnot. I can tell you that since I switched to a more cash-only method, I feel great relief when I see a PayPal option on a website.

Not only does it simplify things, it is a LOT more reliable to know the transaction is handled through PayPal rather than giving a check number/account number/routing number to a total stranger. jrcs3 is right; cart code is hard, and when it's a site I've never done business with before I'd rather not find out that they have not put in the time to do it right.

It can be less impressive to see a big goofy "We Accept PayPay!" logo on the front page of a site. Just like it's unimpressive to see a page counter, or a "passes validation" or any other badges. It's also extremely unimpressive to see typos, poor grammar, and bad clipart.

But I think there is nothing unimpressive about giving customers options that make them feel safer and less inconvenienced. You simply have to have to integrate these choices into your site gracefully so that your site doesn't get flagged right-off as pasted together and amateur.

Answer 3

I am actually more likely to purchase from an unknown site if they have the paypal logo than if they are rolling their own cart.

With the paypal checkout I know that the site owners will not get (or store) my card information. The number 1 problem with all of the data leakage (at least in the US) is from merchants holding on to credit card numbers far beyond the time that the transaction occurred.

They don't need this information and, frankly, I know more than enough about data security to know that even if they aren't scoundrels, someone is eventually going to get that data. So, better for it to pass directly to paypal and through their network than through the vendors databases.

Answer 4

A lot of large Internet stores offer PayPal as an option. I pay my cell phone bill with PayPal. PayPal is well trusted and main stream. I don't think it is a "hobby-level" option at all. I'm sure many users would appreciate the extra payment option.

Where you might possibly run into a reputability concern is if you only offer PayPal as an option. That might raise a red flag in a lot of users' eyes because it has such a low barrier for entry; contrast that to a merchant account where you have to have a real business to take payments by credit card.

Answer 5

Hell no!

Sometimes I get really disappointed when sites don't offer that option. To me, it's becoming as essential as VISA. Sometimes I don't want to use my CC (for various reasons), I'd rather use my pay pal.