We dropped the U.S. PayPal as a payment option. We now only take Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and Amex. Here is a list of reasons why:
*WebSite Payments Pro "Rolling Reserve"
PayPal takes 30% of all of our cart transactions and holds the money for 90 DAYS in a "rolling reserve". In other words, if somebody buys a $200 controller, they immediately debit our PayPal account for $60. The money is unavailable for 90 days. This might be acceptable for a multi-million dollar retail site, but not for our small LLC. This 30% adds up quickly. It's rather frustrating to have thousands of dollars of your hard earned money constantly tied up in PayPal's "rolling reserve" which, as we all know, they use to gamble on the stock market and to gain interest from our money while they are holding it.
*PayPal has a mandatory 3-day delay before you can talk to telephone support
Is your PayPal cart broken, and is it the fault of a bug in PayPal's processing server? Good luck getting a hold of PayPal support. The first call goes to India. After 24-48 hours, you will receive a call from the U.K. office. Within another 24-36 hours, you will receive a call from the U.S. office. The U.S. office is the only office that has staff that can actually help with any problems with PayPal's back-end server. This 48-72 hour delay happened to us at least a dozen times, especially when trying to followup on complaints from customers about PayPal's processing gateway. If we only had PayPal as a payment option, our shopping cart would only be available about 90% of the time due to PayPal outages.
*PayPal is great for customers who want to commit fraud
We're never sure if we're going to win a dispute by customers who claim they never received a package, when that customer paid by PayPal. Even if we ship to the verified address, require signature confirmation, and produce the signature confirmation to PayPal, sometimes they rule in the customer's favor. We've found that we have a much lower fraud attempt rate on non-PayPal transactions. And those customers that do try to rip us off, find it nearly impossible when they paid us via Visa/MC/Amex/Discover. These companies require that the customer file and sign a legal affidavit. PayPal doesn't require anything in writing to process a dispute.
