From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2005-05-29T12:25:32+09:00
Subject: Re: ADV: Rail Beta Book now available

On May 28, 2005, at 10:47 PM, Dave Thomas wrote:

>
> On May 27, 2005, at 3:16 AM, Nicholas Wieland wrote:
>
>> Anyway, it seems that your site doesn't support Paypal payment, just
>> Visa/Mastercard. I'd be happy to buy the PDF + Book but actually I use
>> Paypal to buy on the net, I don't have a credit card for
>> Do I have to wait for the book ?
>>
>
> I'm afraid right now we don't accept Paypal--we try to keep our 
> overheads down, and Visa/MC is already a major headache :)
>
> Does anyone experience as a Paypal merchant? How are they to work with?

How tight would your integration with Paypal have to be? Would you want 
a real-time syncing to your system, etc.? If you can handle a little 
delay in your processing, maybe you could have Paypal customers

1. tell you they're going to order through Paypal, and record that as a 
sort of provisional order in your DB,
2. have them pay through Paypal, which automatically notifies you via 
email,
3. periodically go through the provisional orders on the backend, 
checking off the ones that actually came through.

This is what we do where I work, it works fine. I suppose generally a 
lot of this depends on the volume of what you're dealing with; I think 
we get from 10-20 PayPal-driven transactions a week.

There is also, of course, a PayPal API so you can be notified in 
real-time. I've never worked with it, as I've got other things on my 
list, so I can't give you any decent suggestions regarding that.

The big upside of PayPal is user convenience. The big downside is that 
their fees are noticeably higher than MC/Visa.

Francis Hwang
http://fhwang.net/