e commerce - paypal alternative

MizMix

Hi,

I'm at the very early stages of setting up on online retail website. My understanding is Paypal is very convenient- minimum clicks to complete the purchase, customisable etc but the fees are very high. As a start up I obviously want to keep costs as low as possible but not at the expense of a more tedious check out where I could loose a sale. Any advise welcome- is paypal the way to go or are there other 'viable' alternatives? I'm suspecting there are no true competitors as nearly every website I shop on seems to offer paypal....

galwayjohn89

What platform are you using for your site.

I would recommend stripe for its flexibility and ease of use but customers like PayPal

corkoian

Look into Stripe. Set up by two lads from Limerick and growing very quickly among large US businesses.

jimmii

I use stripe and PayPal. Stripe is cheaper at first but once you are doing a reasonable amount PayPal's fees drop and it works out less. Online transactions are always going to he expensive no way round that unfortunately.

MizMix

Meeting the web designer on Tuesday but I think wordpress/woocommerce. Yes heard of stripe and that their customer service is far superior with lower service charges. I think in terms of transactions 4k is around the point paypal starts getting cheaper but as a start up I don't think I'll be at the point for the first few months but would hope to be thereafter....thanks will do some more research!

jimmii

In the long term PayPal will probably be the cheaper option. I have never had to use the customer service for PayPal and my only experience with customer service on stripe was on sign up! It hopefully won't be something you need to use often! To make any money online in most cases you would want to be doing €10k+ a month realistically up to that all your gross profit will probably be going on seo and AdWords etc.

jimmii

conor27459 wrote: »

There's a new provider operating in Ireland past 12 months, Payment Sense they sell online transactions by the bundle, will set up your shopping cart if necessary. Rates not bad .26c for a debit card sale. No long term contract. Check them out on Google or message me back and will give you a contact number. Why not try just buying a bundle of transactions I.e. 300 for €20 quid to kick off.

0.26c seems a bit too good to be true?

The main reason to go PayPal is trust with sales when there is no person to person interaction people will be pretty cautious about using sites with unknown names attached.

MizMix

Trust is a big thing so paypal still looking more appealing. working out projections but will be focusing a lot on inbound marketing/content from social media platforms (SEO doesn't have to cost that much).

JMR

jimmii wrote: »

To make any money online you would want to be doing €10k+ a month realistically up to that all your gross profit will probably be going on seo and AdWords etc.

Maybe true for a very competitive market but not true across many sectors, I would think.
There is money to made in a niche.

jimmii

JMR wrote: »

Maybe true for a very competitive market but not true across many sectors, I would think.
There is money to made in a niche.

Money to be made everywhere but you need to let people know you are there. We're niche and spend about €1k a month on SEO & AdWords and its only just scratching the surface.

JMR

jimmii wrote: »

Money to be made everywhere but you need to let people know you are there. We're niche and spend about €1k a month on SEO & AdWords and its only just scratching the surface.

Maybe we have differing ideas of what defines a niche?
When we first launched our .co.uk site we ran an AdWords campaign for approx 6 months and used the services of an SEO for 4 months but now rankings are good enough (top 3) to dispense with both.

We've never needed SEO or AdWords for our .ie site as there is less competition.

jimmii

JMR wrote: »

Maybe we have differing ideas of what defines a niche?
When we first launched our .co.uk site we ran an AdWords campaign for approx 6 months and used the services of an SEO for 4 months but now rankings are good enough (top 3) to dispense with both.

We've never needed SEO or AdWords for our .ie site as there is less competition.

How do you know what they are planning on doing is niche? Just because you didn't need it doesn't mean that other don't in general SEO/AdWords is key to getting a site up and running. We're one of only two places in the City that sell our product but the SEO and AdWords mean we get people from all over the country coming to us as they think we're the only place that stocks it so definitely helps for us.

JMR

jimmii wrote: »

How do you know what they are planning on doing is niche?

I don't. I was just pointing out that your statement below wasn't true in all cases.

jimmii wrote: »

To make any money online you would want to be doing €10k+ a month realistically up to that all your gross profit will probably be going on seo and AdWords etc.

jimmii

JMR wrote: »

I don't. I was just pointing out that your statement below wasn't true in all cases.

lol ok thats fair enough. Have edited now to clear that up.