Home / E-Commerce / Don't be Afraid of PayPal with Joomla 
E-Commerce
Jan
26
2007
Don't be Afraid of PayPal with Joomla

A few weeks back, we blogged companies that had bad image problems and how they responded to those results appearing in the search engines. Paypal and JoomlaSome such as Hewlett Packard were able to shake off the bad press, but for others such as Registerfly.com and PayPal.com negative news was only a click away. Search for PayPal in Google, or Yahoo and you'll find the following sites in the top-10 search results:

 

If you haven't seen these sites before, go and have a look around. I want you to realise that I'm saying the following with my eyes wide open:

 

PayPal is the best choice for small business Joomla e-commerce.

 

It might sound counter-intuitive but I recommend it for the following reasons:

 

  • SSLs and Joomla do not play happily together. Utilizing a payment gateway such as PayPal that doesn't require an SSL will save you a lot of time and money. Small businesses are better off spending their money on promoting their product than going for a more complicated payment gateway.
  • PayPal used to be restricted to only a few countries - no longer. 103 countries now.
  • There's no set-up fee, unlike Authorize.net and other and no resellers to bother with (what a frustrating system that is).
  • People don't mind leaving your site as much as you think. I hear the following complaint a lot: "I want everything to look seamless.  I don't want people to leave my site". Well, thats all well and good if you're making a lot of money and you can afford another payment processor, the SSL and the maintenance. However, if you're a small business and you've done your job correctly on the rest of the site, building trust with the visitor, they won't mind leaving your site to visit a payment processor.
  • Its the most popular. Internet Explorer might not be perfect, but we design websites for it. Pirates of the Caribbean might not be the best movie ever made, but it sure made a lot of money. The same goes for PayPal - people are familiar with it and that breeds confidence in most people.
  • Most big Joomla sites use PayPal, including Joomlashack.com, Phil-Taylor.com and ELearningforce.biz.

In future strong rivals may emerge, but for now its PayPal. However, you still need to take precautions:

 

  • Withdraw money as soon as you can (Just to be on the safe side - you did read those anti-PayPal sites, right?).
  • Be prepared for the occassional chargeback. This is not a problem unique to PayPal however.
  • Use PayPal's customization features. Add your logo to the top of the PayPal page, to build confidence.

All in all, I'd recommend that at a small business start with PayPal and spend the first few months concentrating on their marketing and brand-building. If the business becomes a success, you can then go back to the issue with your extra time and money and work on upgrading to Authorize.net or 2Checkout.com. At the beginning, however, keep it simple. I wouldn't recommend trusting PayPal completely any more than I'd recommend trusting your bank or credit card company, but I would recommend it to build your small Joomla business.
 

Comments  

 
#1 Amy Stephen 2007-01-27 09:19
Quote:
building trust with the visitor, they won't mind leaving your site to visit a payment processor.


In fact, I think linking out to a Paypal site can build trust with your visitor. Everyone knows Paypal, but who are you?

Another excellent article, Steve. I am impressed with the richness of your material -- delivered every single day.
Quote
 
 
#2 Steve Burge 2007-01-27 09:45
Thanks for the kind words, Amy

I'll always have some paranoia when using PayPal, but I think thats healthy. Its easy to put too much faith in online transactions.
Quote
 
 
#3 Mark Warner 2008-03-19 15:45
Just came across this whilst researching Joomla & VirtueMart, I'm in the process of moving my sisters web site from osCommerce to Joomla & VM and was wondering if PayPal was the right way to go with the new site. This was very helpful, thanks!
Quote
 
 
#4 WebTechGlobal 2009-01-28 11:32
Paypal is an excellent solution especially for the less experianced.

Just be careful like it says above. If your going to dispatch a product after payment make sure your site using IPN to retain your customers full information.

Where possible call your customer on a landline to confirm their purchase.

Tell your customer in a seperate email that their item has been posted. Make a policy of say 14 days delivery maximum 7 days average (for overseas). Do not dispath the item for 2-3 days or longer if you fail to get any contact with them or suspect anything.

If fruad is going to be attempted it will happen within 48 hours because these scammers get nervous about leaving the money their too long and want it back as soon as they think you dispatched the item. All they need to do is tell Paypal someone else use their account to buy the product (fruad at their end) even if the delivery address sent to you by paypal is their own address, Paypal stupid that they are withdraw the money from your account and give it back to them.

If you sent the product like I have then your seriously out of pocket! It is rare and only worth worrying about for high prices products.
Quote
 
 
#5 Ronald B 2009-04-25 00:14
Making easy money is very common these days. The global economic recession teaches us to be aware of the importance of investing and saving money. Increasing taxes and paying bills add up to the economic stress of everyone. In filing for taxes, an easy and accessible way is by using a post office locator. A post office locator can come in handy in a pinch. If you have a package you really need to get in the mail, or if you waited to the last minute to do your taxes on the 15th of April, and haven't joined the 21st century yet and E-Filed (you Luddites, you), take heart. You won't need personal loans to air mail it, because some post offices will be open until midnight on April 15th. It isn't all of them, so you need to find out if it applies to your nearest one. You don't want to need debt consolidation for fines from the IRS because you couldn't use the post office locator.

http://personalmoneystore.com/moneyblog/2009/04/15/post-office-locator-helps-file-taxes-today/
Quote
 
 
#6 Asad Qureshi 2009-08-11 12:49
Agreed. Agreed. Agreed. But what one should do to use Paypal with Joomla. It is not picking up the BUY NOW Button's code. Simple HTML page does. Kindly help.
Quote
 

Add comment


Security code
Refresh