2checkout VS PayPal

[Wayne Luke]

Paypal and 2Checkout provide two completely different services.

2Checkout is a payment processor who handles credit card and electronic check purchases. It is no different than going to the store and running your credit card through a POS terminal. All they do is process a sell, they don't care about you once the money has been transferred.

Paypal is a pseudocash and wallet provider. This is why they require the buyer as well as the seller to have accounts with them. It isn't to make things a hassle or difficult in purchasing. It actually makes it easier after the initial registration process. Once a customer is signed up they have no hassle purchasing at thousands of shops with no transfer of credit card or bank information to the seller. The seller gets more sales, the buyer gets piece of mind.

For example, I will only bid on eBay auctions that accept Paypal and Paypal is the only way I will pay for these auctions. This is because you really have no way of telling who that person is. It is safer for me to keep my credit card information out of their potentially grubby little hands...

There are many people more strict than that with their credit cards and pseudocash gives them a better piece of mind about making purchases on the Internet. I will always offer multiple methods of payment on my retail sites and Paypal is one of those methods.

[Chen]

Does 2CO take a percentage for each credit card transaction like PayPal does... or is that why you pay the initial fee?

2CO takes 5.5% of the transaction value in addition to $0.45 per transaction. It's a lot compared to PayPal (more than twice as much), but not so bad when compared to other payment processors such as WorldPay (who take 10% last time I looked). Of course there's a reason their fees are relatively low, but please don't get me started on 2CheckOut...

[vBR]

Of course there's a reason their fees are relatively low, but please don't get me started on 2CheckOut...

Please, by all means, do get started on 2CO.
If you've had bad experiences with them, I'd like to know before I sign up.

[Chen]

Well, first of all, if your'e going to be using recurring payments - don't. They are severly broken and I'm not sure they even work, and hosts who use 2CheckOut keep having problems with them. You could use normal payments and send invoices to your users every month, but that's up to you.

Second of all, their support is out of the ordinary. For the bad. Days can go by, sometimes more, before your ticket gets looked at or replied to. Because of that you usually have to use the forums, which are also poorly handled and most of the time other customers have to answer your questions. But it gets better - when actual 2CO representatives reply to your post, sometimes they are not too nice... to say the least. Especially Wadsworth, he's a real piece of work.

I almost forgot: Their API is not too good. It's not nearly as secure as PayPal's IPN, and doesn't offer half of the options they have. A lot of custom coding had to go into the system in order to make it a bit better, on my part. But there are still a lot of features I dearly miss, such as being notified when an order is "suspicious" in the interface itself and not only in the email that sent to me. And did I mention that this email is only sent to the vendors about 12 hours after the transaction?

But that said, I guess I'm still using them because there's nothing better out there that is so cheap... at least as far as I know. We've sent PaySystems (previously Revecom) a couple of simple questions but haven't heard anything back and it's been a few weeks already (of course that didn't stop them from sending me spam - somehow they got my email address from 2CheckOut's website, probably forums). Luckily I don't require their assistance that often (but when I did it was a poor experience), so their lack os support is not something I am too bothered about.

Just my 2 cents minus 5.5%.