Lately a few prospective clients we’ve run into have asked us to explain the benefits of using FastSpring over PayPal.  We posted not too long ago on “What Makes FastSpring Different From Cheaper, More General E-Commerce Services?”, but let’s look at the PayPal question specifically.  This time around, rather than my focusing on the benefits of FastSpring, I thought I’d ask a few clients and friends who had previously used PayPal to list any issues or limitations they experienced when using PayPal for their e-commerce.

“PayPal’s reporting is extremely limited.”
“Virtually impossible to use for serious businesses without extensive external code or a system to manage customer flow/cross/upsells.”
“You spend too much precious time on e-commerce tasks and way too little time on marketing and dev.”
“For business-to-business products, clients do not take you seriously as a potential supplier if PayPal is your main payment method.”
“No branding on PayPal order pages means fewer purchases!  My order page needs to blend in with the rest of my site or too many people will bail on us”
“No fulfillment support”
“Tax responsibilities are on the client, ugh.”
“Huge problems with spam filters on PayPal — we automatically send out logins once an order is processed yet a higher percentage is not received than is received.”
“They have virtually no fraud screening.”
“Their system is very clunky, as far as looking up orders, pulling reports, checking a history etc…”
“PayPal heavily favors the purchaser not the vendor selling, as in chargebacks or disputes etc.”
“I don’t get notification of orders on a consistent basis, I have to login and check orders daily”
“We sell off multiple sites with the same PayPal account and the reporting to figure out which sites generated which sales is a nightmare”
“Lacks professionalism”
“Their UI stinks, it takes me a while to figure out how to do things in their system”
“I have heard too much about PayPal’s abuses to trust them.  When I see something where the only payment option is PayPal, I select a different option: not buying.”
“No ability to offer upsells (at least that I can figure out)”

FastSpring addresses most every issue described above.  PayPal appears at first as though it saves a little money in transaction costs, but the big question you discover is…at what cost, in terms of PayPal’s limitations as well as the opportunity cost of using a basic service.  People tend to overly focus on the small % increase in fees that comes with using FastSpring over PayPal and they miss the critical figure - the percentage that utilizing a full service solution like FastSpring increases their overall revenue.

When you consider the cost on your business of PayPal’s limitations and the benefit on your business of using FastSpring’s full service features and tools to increase your overall revenue, it becomes apparent that the financial benefits of utilizing FastSpring far exceed the small difference in transaction fees between PayPal and FastSpring.

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