Paypal now spoken here.

I’ve always thought of credit card processing as a commodity item. In the early days we had to open a merchant account ($150/month) and setup relationships between the various cards. They would tack on their own percentages and various surcharges. It wasn’t until a few years ago I stumbled upon 2checkout . It was brilliant, no per-month fees, only transactions (5.5% plus $.45/charge). The money was automatically wired into your checking account twice a month. I never had an issue with processing or customer service. I thought that this would be the end all service until I purchased something off of eBay….

I always perceived Paypal as the niche market payment system for small purchases (<$1,000). It was interesting but I didn’t think it would scale very well. I started poking around and found that you can setup corporate accounts and process credit cards. Intrigued, I brought up the fees page. Hmm, no per-month fees, only transactions.. Their worst percentage is 2.9% plus $.30/charge, well this got my attention. In addition they charge you LESS of a percentage with a larger transaction.

Now this got my attention. One might think that a 2.6% change in fees is minor until you start processing a LOT of transactions as we are now doing with SimpleSync.

There are two additional things that convinced me. Paypal itself is now a payment option. If you have a Paypal account you can now pay without having to risk sending your credit card numbers over the internet. But you might ask, “You need to use your Paypal password, isn’t that just as bad or worse”. Yes, absolutely. For a one time fee of $5.00 you can purchase PayPal’s Security key , affectionately nicknamed “the football”. This is basically the same as an RSA token which gives you a new one-time password every 30 seconds.

Starting today, we will be switching to Paypal for our credit card and online payments. You will see the change when you receive a quote or invoice from us. As usual, feedback is extremely important to us. Please contact us at sales@dirwiz.com if you see anything unusual or just have a question about the process.