PayPal Vs. Realex

ballooba

I'm not really intending on using either of these, it's for a Research essay. I'm just wondering at what point the transaction charges make it attractive to switch from PayPal to Realex. I've read that after about €3,000 per month sales it's more economical to use Realex.

Seth Brundle

dunno about realex, but paypal charge per transaction as well as a percentage of the transaction fee so if your average transaction amount is high then overall you would pay less.
https://www.paypal.com/ie/cgi-bin/helpscr?cmd=_display-fees


edit: kind of!

ballooba

The entry level monthly fee with Realex is €49 for up to 50 transactions. That means you could be paying equivalent to between €49 and €0.98 per transaction.

The Realex per transaction fee only really compares to PayPal when you are processing 2500 transactions per month or more. 2500 transactions per month at €860 is €0.344 per transaction.

The percentage amounts offered by the banks are lower though at % (or so I have been led to believe) compared to .4% with PayPal.

mneylon

ballooba wrote:

The percentage amounts offered by the banks are lower though at % (or so I have been led to believe) compared to .4% with PayPal.

That will depend on your transaction volume.

Paypal offer reduced rates based on certain thresholds. If you're doing about 2k+ with Paypal for 3 months you get the reduction (check their site - I'm working from memory)

Realex work out cheaper for higher volumes naturally and you also have the advantage of getting access to the funds almost immediately, whereas with Paypal you have to wait 5 working days for a withdrawal to come into your bank.

Of course you can use your paypal funds online, but you won't be able to pay staff wages using paypal

DJB

This may be of interest:

http://www.davidbehan.com/blog/?p=7

Seth Brundle

blacknight wrote:

Of course you can use your paypal funds online, but you won't be able to pay staff wages using paypal

You can draw PP funds down into a bank account (free if >€100)

steve-hosting36

By having a direct Merchant account with an acquiring bank (required for realex) you can pay as little as not much more than 1% if you volume is good enough. Paypal is an excellent option for very small transaction levels, otherwise I would strongly recommend Realex if you are 'serious' about processing payments online.

mneylon

kbannon wrote:

You can draw PP funds down into a bank account (free if >€100)

Yes. I never said you couldn't. (See my post above)

But you have to wait 5 days

PixelTrawler

Interesting this thread should come up. Im about to start developing a few different things requiring a payment processor.

I have a reasonable idea of how to do payment processing with Paypal but is it much more difficult to setup using Realex.

With paypal you're more or less getting the processor and merchant account all rolled in one (Paypal Pro?). I have my paypal sandbox accounts ready for testing

It would seem that while Paypal may be slighty more expensive, it doesnt appear to be difficult to get going.

Whereas I have no idea how to setup using Realex. Do Realex offer similar sandbox environments, and also with Realex, do you have to have a separate merchant account.

I suppose in simple terms my question is, if your sales arent going to be very high, is paypal the handy option.

Seth Brundle

blacknight wrote:

Yes. I never said you couldn't. (See my post above)

But you have to wait 5 days

Apologies - I didn't see that bit in your post

mneylon

kbannon wrote:

Apologies - I didn't see that bit in your post

No worries

Chardee MacDennis

drjohnclarke wrote: »

There was a similar thread to this on www.webpayments.ie recently.

It's not as simple as just comparing the costs of Paypal versus the like of Realex (or other Irish Payment Gateways, such as www.WorldNetTPS.com who I work for).

If you are selling to a mainly Irish domestic market, you need to accept Laser, or you'll lose 30%+ of potential sales.

And just using PayPal has a much higher abandonment rate that using a Payment Gateway (again, I've seen completions increase by 40% simply from moving from Paypal to a merchant account).

If you're a startup, and want to get online quickly, Paypal is fine. But as your business grows, your payment acceptance strategy will have to change also.

i am not sure it matters anymore, with this thread being 18months old...

gimme5minutes

BastardPrince wrote: »

i am not sure it matters anymore, with this thread being 18months old...

Why, have people stopped building websites or something?

mneylon

gimme5minutes wrote: »

Why, have people stopped building websites or something?

A thread this old is likely to contain out of date information.