A good article on why business should accept Paypal and Google Checkout.

..according to a recent survey by JupiterResearch. Among Internet users, 33% said they had a PayPal account and 23% called it their preferred way to pay.

…other benefits of accepting PayPal …of the 153 million PayPal account holders, 36 million have used PayPal in the past 90 days, suggesting a large and loyal cadre of PayPal users.

And many of them keep balances in their PayPal accounts, often accumulated through sales on eBay. At any given time there is $2.5 billion in PayPal accounts, and that money typically turns over every two weeks. Much of that gets spent online, and 18% of U.S. online shoppers in a recent PayPal-sponsored survey said they would not have made a purchase if the retailer had not taken PayPal.

(Via Workhappy.net.)

I have been using Paypal for a number of years and it has worked out very well, with one exception - subscriptions.

We recently moved from Paypal to Trust Commerce for subscription processing for MailTank.

The main problems with subscriptions at Paypal are:

1. Poor descriptions of errors and card expirations that terminate a subscription. You can’t tell easily whether it is the customer or some issue at Paypal based on the transaction records.

2. Difficult to identify what subscriptions are active from their transaction logs. Its possible but not easy or fast to do so.

3. No way to create a subscription manually. Some customers do not want to jump through the hoops of going to the Paypal site, creating an account and entering their information.

The opposite seems to be true for Trust Commerce. It was very easy to integrate, their API is robust and the the ability to create, view, modify and cancel subscriptions both through their API and manually is a real winner.

Not to mention, we can call someone up directly over there, unlike the telephone maze at Paypal.

I still use Paypal for one off purchases, such as MailTemplate and it works great.