Using PayPal as your payment processing solution has its fair share of advantages, especially if you’re a smaller business with bootstrapped resources. By supplementing that solution with a few additional safeguards, you can significantly enhance the way you’re transacting payments while also mitigating risks.
If you’re just getting your ecommerce business up and running, PayPal is an enticing solution to start with. It’s free to set up, quick to deploy, and it offers its own hosted checkout that will save you time and resources to build internally. There are no monthly fees and if you want to cancel your account at any time, there is no termination charge.
Due to its “out-of-the-box” nature, however, there are a few elements of PayPal as a payment processing solution that can be strengthened by also leveraging the Origins Ecommerce platform alongside it. These are as follows:
Chargebacks
Regardless of what solution you’re using to process payments, chargebacks will always be an area you need to be mindful of. There is no way to completely prevent them from happening, but you can apply some mitigation techniques.
If you’re only using PayPal, you will be required to manually manage the chargeback dispute process yourself, which can be a long, arduous, and costly task. Even if you follow all the right steps, you still might be on the wrong end of the dispute verdict.
One of the big strengths of using Origins Ecommerce is that you will be entitled to tools designed to help enforce mitigation tactics. Not only that, but when an inevitable chargeback does occur, Origins Ecommerce will utilize its team of experienced compliance experts to manage the dispute for you.
Buyer Protection
Currently, PayPal is better equipped to protect businesses who sell physical goods and services. This is because it’s easier to prove the legitimacy of disputes when an item is shipped and there is concrete proof that a buyer received their purchase. If you’re selling digital products however, PayPal’s Buyer Protection does not protect you.
With that said, if you’re a digital business, you can still make a dispute directly with the issuing bank if you feel like the chargeback warrants one. This can be a lot of work to do manually, but with Origins Ecommerce, this process is taken care of for you. The business support team (which we’ll talk about in more detail later in this article) will track key digital information (like an IP address) that will help prove that a legitimate digital purchase was made and activated.
External Checkout
When using PayPal as your ecommerce transaction method, users will have to travel away from your domain to make their transaction, and then be directed back to your website once the purchase has been made. While it’s nice that you don’t have to manage this checkout page, it may unfortunately cause some of your potential customers to get confused or annoyed at having to carry out multiple steps to simply purchase your goods or services.
Businesses can reduce the number of customers bouncing by clearly stating - before the transaction journey begins - that they will be navigating off of their website to use a secured and compliant third-party platform. Transparency is key in this regard.
Additionally, if you use Origins Ecommerce, users will be guided to a fully branded checkout page, meaning there is far less chance of a bounce from occurring due to the above reasoning.
Account Management
Because of the massive size of PayPal, and the number of businesses that are using it, getting personalized account support can sometimes be a challenge (and understandably so). Should you have an issue that needs to get resolved, you’re limited to email and online ticketing. As a result of this, you could find yourself waiting awhile to get the assistance you need, which could cause your business to take a devastating hit if it is your only way of processing payments.
If you’re using Origins Ecommerce alongside PayPal, however, you’ll have direct access to a team of account managers who will work with you to resolve any problems that may arise quickly and efficiently.
Billing Support
While we’re on the topic of support, it’s also important to note that PayPal currently does not offer direct billing support with respect to those who have purchased your product. While this might seem like an extravagance to have, having a team in place to deal with payment-related inquries that also understand your business and your offerings can make a huge difference – particularly when it comes to resolving disputes.
As mentioned in the Buyer’s Protection section above, the support team also specializes in providing billing support to your customers, which allows you to spend less time resolving individual cases, and more time focusing on achieving your business goals.
Data Analytics
For those who want a basic understanding of payment trends and summaries, PayPal’s analytics dashboard will likely provide you with the fundamentals you need. However, if you’re looking to dive deeper and report on specific activities, PayPal might not be able to provide you with the deeper, more detailed insights you need to take your optimization efforts to a higher level.
The analytics dashboard will allow you to run real-time reports and provide an overview of your business with options to drill down to specific transactional details so that you can pinpoint exactly where your prioritization efforts should occur.
Account Freezing
Because PayPal is liable for all the payments that your business is processing, they have the right to freeze your account and suspend your funds at any time. While most of the time this is due to fraudulent activity, there are actually a variety of legitimate reasons that could cause a freeze to occur, such as more transactions happening suddenly, larger transactions taking place, or if there is an increase in refund requests.
PayPal isn’t managing this entire process manually, which means there are layers of automation that could flag your business even if the nature of your transactional changes are completely innocent. Should you find yourself in this unfortunate position, it could take months to have your account restored, if ever, and there is simply nothing you can do to expedite this.
There are also complexities involved with the initial configuration of your PayPal account that could also lead to an account freeze which can be incredibly frustrating for new ecommerce businesses trying to get up and running.
Origins Ecommerce support team can help you navigate through all of the scenarios listed above. Should you need assistance dealing with a significant change in payment activity, or getting your account set up in a way that meets PayPal’s standards, the Origins Ecommerce team will have answers to any questions you may have, and recommendations on the best steps to take.
As seen above, there are ample benefits to leveraging Origins Ecommerce as a supplemental platform. The key is to think of it as an enhancement – not a replacement – to your PayPal payment operations.
In addition to what we listed above, there are other benefits to deploying a secondary platform, like being able to use it as your primary gateway in geographic areas where your primary may not currently cover, having additional payment method compatibility, or even positioning it so that it can be used to eventually replace your primary option once you’ve reached a point of scale that deems the transactional fees of your primary solution too expensive for your bottom line.
At the end of the day, businesses who make the moves to augment their processes stand to benefit the most from their efforts.
