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Comment by skylark | Hacker News Reader

I currently work at a medium sized startup which processes ~100 million dollars / year. We offer both Stripe and PayPal.

The vast majority of our users prefer PayPal (80%+). For one particular product we had to roll out using Stripe only, the number one customer service request we had was to provide PayPal as an option. Subscription numbers rose by over 50% overnight when including it as a choice (literally tens of thousands of people signed up after the change).

Internationally, PayPal seems like the de facto choice for making online purchases. In addition, outside of the Bay Area tech bubble, I believe people in the states are simply more comfortable with using PayPal over Stripe.

While PayPal gets a lot of hate, I'd think long and hard before deciding not to offer it as a payment processor. It's possible that you're leaving a significant amount of money on the table.

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I am interested in this, I participated in some tests on a few ecommerce sites in the past and it seemed to not make much of a difference, except for very new b2c apparel type companies that had no name recognition with consumers. In those cases Paypal did help some, but honestly branding, messaging and other things mattered just as much if not more. The sample act of having a prominently placed phone number on the site we found would lift sales, having a real address not a PO Box etc, would lift sales etc. Consumers feel better if they can find you and talk to you other then via just email. This also changes demographically too as we found.

You mentioned subscriptions, so I am assuming this is some type of B2C app or B2C service? Can you say what industry and what it is? e.g. Service, App, or ? And what is the typical transaction amount? This all likely is a factor too.

Also, you mentioned users preferring Paypal over Stripe, in 90% of our cases it was Paypal or the "business", clients never knew the business was using Stripe or First Data etc. Never tested that part on consumers decision process though, e.g. Stripe checkout vs Paypal checkout.

Interesting observations, thanks. We've been wondering about a similar thing for a small business we run that uses Stripe and sometimes gets requests from potential customers about PayPal.

My biggest concern with the latter is that if you want a vault+token system to avoid the serious PCI DSS hassles, PayPal seems to keep changing its mind about what the different options are: every time I've looked for quite a few years now, it seems like there are always several different things that each do (a different) 50-75% of what we're looking for, without any way to get the degree of control you have with some of the other services.

It's not like we have weird, exotic requirements, but we do want the flexibility to do things like moving a customer from one plan to another if they upgrade/downgrade, or reducing their payments temporarily or permanently as a result of a promotional offer, without them having to effectively sign up again with the payment service every time. Do you have any related issues with your startup, and if so, would you mind saying a bit about how you handled them with the different payment services you use?

I think the best thing to do with PayPal if you're doing an ongoing subscription with different plan levels or addons, is to use Pre-Approved Payments. This basically allows you to get a PayPal token which you can use like a Stripe token -- that is, you can tell PayPal "here's this token, I need to charge it $4.99" and they will do so anytime you ask.

As you might expect, they watch companies using this type of API very closely so obviously don't use abuse it. But we've been using it from around a year now with Roll20 an d have had great success with it. It allows our customers to link their PayPal account to their Roll20 account one time, and then buy subscriptions or digital one-off content without needing to log into PayPal again or anything like that, just as if they had a stored credit card on file with our Stripe integration.

The benefit from the consumer side is that you can log into your PayPal account at any time, and see exactly when and how much you've been charged over the life of the relationship, plus end the relationship on the PayPal side with one click. So it's really a win-win I think.

Note that we also do offer using a regular PayPal checkout flow for one-off content if you're not a subscriber, but as soon as someone wants to get on a subscription plan we have them do the pre-approved payments agreement with us.

It's very simple, IMO: people have PayPal accounts. Typing your password is a lot less friction than typing out your card info and billing address.

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