online payments Archive

A month ago, we switched our payments on CloudContacts from Paypal and Google Checkout to the new payments service from Stripe. I’ve been meaning to post about why we switched and since Greg Taylor posted today about his switch to Stripe, I figured this was a good time to start my string of posts about my online commerce payments research I’ve completed over the past few months. There is a good discussion of Greg’s post on Hacker News. Greg mainly discusses moving from Paypal to either WePay and Stripe and ultimately selecting the latter.

When I launched CloudContacts two years ago, I made the decision to use Paypal and Google Checkout as the payment services we would offer because after speaking with friends and colleagues, it seemed like people trust these services and as a new service, customers might be more likely to pay with one of these services. Initially we used a shopping cart with E-Junkie.

Shortly thereafter we created a custom checkout which had the following flow:

• CC Order Form > off site > PP/GC > back to site >CC Thank You

It seemed like everything was going well — every once in a while we would get an inquiry from a potential customer that they wanted to pay with a credit card and we explained that you could use a credit card on both Paypal and Google Checkout.

And then I started to do some analysis and realized the biggest mistake I’ve made with CloudContacts to-date. What I found was that a number of customers filled in our order form, went off to Paypal or Google Checkout, but never completed the order. Many of our business customers aren’t web savvy and the fact that they had to input their info twice if they needed to create a pp/gc account was just a headache. I know we all think that everyone has a Paypal and Google account but this really isn’t the truth and even if someone has a Google account, it doesn’t mean they have set it up with Payments (now Wallet) access and information.

I emailed a few of them and asked if they would explain why they didn’t complete the purchase and the overwhelming response was that it was just too much work and that they didn’t have Paypal nor Google accounts.

Continue reading “Moving to Stripe: Fixing the Biggest Mistake I’ve Made to Date” »