I feel I should make the statement, since I had previously announced I was building in paypal support to my programs.
I need to state, that in the 2 years since paypal has been alive, they have gone steadily down hill, with the past few months being the absolute worst. They no longer offer any advantages over getting your own merchant account (if you are a real business) and they certainly don't offer better rates. Most merchant accounts are now charging 1.29-1.69 for swiped sales, and 2.49-2.69 for non-swipe internet sales. That beats the 3% paypal rate, and the "surcharges" they continue to apply to all transactions not only credit cards.
I will stop short of saying they are [explicative deleted] but they are not much beyond that.
This is my personal opinion from dealing with them the past 2+ years, and watching their service and quaility decline, and their "practices" alter to being somewhat deceptive and problematic. After a world of problems with them, and hearing about a world of issues involving them, I am not going to use them as my payment gateway any longer, so I have no incentive to support them.
My programs will have an "interface" in them that should allow adapting to any payment gateway system, including paypal, as long as your plugin/interface returns the proper data in the proper format, but I will not be specifically writing an interface for paypal.
For anyone looking at taking money on-line, doing a thorough investigation of the options available today, and a comparason of the rates, and features should be a top priority. Granted, we are a brick/morter operation, so we had an advantage, but I have been doing a LOT of investigation of payment gateways, gateway processing, and such, (for our own use and for the program interface) and the land scape is very different from what it was even 6 months ago.
I may make my findings available, as a "road map" through the maze at a later date, but I am not going to endorse a single, or group, of merchant processors, since each has an advantage in their own market.
FWIW -- paypal is of benefit if you BUY on-line, since so many "small" businesses use them for credit cards, but if you are taking money on-line, there are better options out there now, and personal transaction services like c2it are going to squeeze paypal from the bottom, while the business transaction processors like PaymentTech and their Ilk will continue to squeeze from the top.
The other change, that seems to have been overlooked in the past year or so, is that the SSL technology for most standard encrypted transactions is now off-patent, so you can get a secure server, and transaction technology without having to go through a licensing process any more. http://www.rsasecurity.com/news/pr/000906-1.html for the press release from RSA. In otherwords you can run a secure server, but you don't have to buy a digital certificate. The two are now different concepts, where the secure server describes the byte-level transaction and the digital certificate describes the validation of the organization making the transaction (ie: that you are really you at the other end of the secure connection).
Anyway... I'm here, I'm alive, and Thursday I should have my new DSL internet connection. I forgot just how frustrating dial up is!! It's literally been years since I've seen the "reconnect" message box in windows!
PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.
The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
I need to state, that in the 2 years since paypal has been alive, they have gone steadily down hill, with the past few months being the absolute worst. They no longer offer any advantages over getting your own merchant account (if you are a real business) and they certainly don't offer better rates. Most merchant accounts are now charging 1.29-1.69 for swiped sales, and 2.49-2.69 for non-swipe internet sales. That beats the 3% paypal rate, and the "surcharges" they continue to apply to all transactions not only credit cards.
I will stop short of saying they are [explicative deleted] but they are not much beyond that.
This is my personal opinion from dealing with them the past 2+ years, and watching their service and quaility decline, and their "practices" alter to being somewhat deceptive and problematic. After a world of problems with them, and hearing about a world of issues involving them, I am not going to use them as my payment gateway any longer, so I have no incentive to support them.
My programs will have an "interface" in them that should allow adapting to any payment gateway system, including paypal, as long as your plugin/interface returns the proper data in the proper format, but I will not be specifically writing an interface for paypal.
For anyone looking at taking money on-line, doing a thorough investigation of the options available today, and a comparason of the rates, and features should be a top priority. Granted, we are a brick/morter operation, so we had an advantage, but I have been doing a LOT of investigation of payment gateways, gateway processing, and such, (for our own use and for the program interface) and the land scape is very different from what it was even 6 months ago.
I may make my findings available, as a "road map" through the maze at a later date, but I am not going to endorse a single, or group, of merchant processors, since each has an advantage in their own market.
FWIW -- paypal is of benefit if you BUY on-line, since so many "small" businesses use them for credit cards, but if you are taking money on-line, there are better options out there now, and personal transaction services like c2it are going to squeeze paypal from the bottom, while the business transaction processors like PaymentTech and their Ilk will continue to squeeze from the top.
The other change, that seems to have been overlooked in the past year or so, is that the SSL technology for most standard encrypted transactions is now off-patent, so you can get a secure server, and transaction technology without having to go through a licensing process any more. http://www.rsasecurity.com/news/pr/000906-1.html for the press release from RSA. In otherwords you can run a secure server, but you don't have to buy a digital certificate. The two are now different concepts, where the secure server describes the byte-level transaction and the digital certificate describes the validation of the organization making the transaction (ie: that you are really you at the other end of the secure connection).
Anyway... I'm here, I'm alive, and Thursday I should have my new DSL internet connection. I forgot just how frustrating dial up is!! It's literally been years since I've seen the "reconnect" message box in windows!
PUGDOG� Enterprises, Inc.
The best way to contact me is to NOT use Email.
Please leave a PM here.
paypal integration -- dropped