What Payment Processor Should I Use? | EP 774

What Payment Processor Should I Use?

Read the full episode transcript below:

00:28 Tim Strifler: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of WP The Podcast I’m Tim Strifler, my co-host David Blackmon is not with us but he’ll be back with us in a few days he is traveling and so uh being a digital Nomad in his RV he sometimes he doesn’t have the uh internet connection or he’s just traveling to a new campsite and stuff like that. It’s hard for our schedules to line up so I’m recording some episodes solo until uh we can get our schedules to line up better. So today we’re talking about what payment processor should you use. Now this is as I mentioned at the end of yesterday’s episode I’m talking about this episode today we’re talking about this kind of from two perspectives one is from an e-commerce perspective you’re building an e-commerce site whether for yourself or for a client and you want to know what payment processor you should use, or what should you recommend to your client if they’re a new business, and then also if you are building websites for clients you should be accepting payments online. You should allow your clients to pay your invoices online. Don’t make your clients write checks we’ve done episodes in the past on why you shouldn’t accept checks, why I don’t accept checks and I haven’t for quite some time. Um but uh yeah I only accept online payments and so I obviously you pay a little bit in processing fees but it’s just the cost of doing business. You raise your prices accordingly um so anyways payment processor I use two and I recommend that you do the same you want to give your client or your customers on an e-commerce site. The option to pay for different methods whatever they’re most comfortable with now the two that I use is Stripe and PayPal. And some people will only use PayPal which I think is a mistake and some people won’t offer PayPal. PayPal isn’t it they’re a payment processor but they’re kind of in their own category they’re not like any other processor because uh first of all people have PayPal accounts you have to have a PayPal account typically I mean you can check out as a guest but most cases people have PayPal accounts. And so people that are comfortable paying with PayPal they have their account they sign in, PayPal has their own fraud dispute resolution department and so people can dispute a charge through PayPal and their their dispute resolution is very fair to their vendors. People that are using them as a processor where typically a dispute that goes through a bank chargeback. Uh you’re always going to lose those as the as the company selling a product even if you’re in the the customer’s in the wrong and they don’t deserve a refund you know whatever um you’re going to lose those but with PayPal you have a very fair dispute resolution Department, that is at PayPal. That will look at your terms and and all of that, and so they’re very fair they don’t just automatically give it to the customer every time, so that’s one of the benefits of PayPal. Also people trust PayPal so it’s like people either love PayPal or hate PayPal and so the people that love PayPal it’s like they all want to use PayPal as much as possible, and so you want to offer PayPal. So again whether it’s an e-commerce site and using Woocommerce something like that, or through your invoicing software you want your clients to be able to pay you through PayPal. If that’s how they’re comfortable paying but you don’t want to make that the only option because some people for some reason are intimidated PayPal or they’re like I don’t have a PayPal account I don’t know maybe they just they don’t know what to do and it’s confusing to them and so um you want to offer people an option just to put in their credit card number right then and there. And so for that we recommend Stripe. Now you can go to a traditional credit card processor and get a merchant account and be able to process credit cards and stuff, but when you go that route you are carrying all that risk and so you have to have certain things in place certain amount of funds that just sit there to cover losses and fraud and stuff like that. And so you basically with a merchant account you’re the merchant on record and so you carry that risk. So you generally when you have a true merchant account like that you pay a little bit less in fees but again you carry all that risk. So generally we recommend using Stripe, or Stripe is not a you don’t have a merchant account you don’t have to go and get approved and show that you have proper assets and stuff like that, like you can be a brand new business with no credit nothing like that, and you can get a Stripe account, you still have to get verified. So they know who you are and stuff like that. Um but stripe is great um I forget that the word for it there but they’re a um they’re it’s not a typical merchant account and so they’re basically carrying that risk for you. Obviously if you do something risky they’re going to ban you um if you’re you’re selling illegal products or you know doing a frauding customers or whatever you’re going to get banned. But you don’t carry that initial risk like you do with a typical merchant account. So that’s why we recommend Stripe. Stripe is awesome and they have really great modern tools modern dashboard they integrate with everything no matter what you’re using what invoicing software you’re using what e-commerce platform you’re using it’s going to integrate with Stripe. They’re a major player so I always put both stripe and PayPal on every Ecommerce website that I build. If I’m having clients pay me I have them given the option of paying with credit card via Stripe or with PayPal. So that’s what we recommend doing uh because it’s just yeah giving your your customers an option you don’t want to give them too many options but giving them multiple options, two options it’s always a good thing. So hopefully you found this helpful. Yeah definitely let us know reach out if you have any additional questions or any episode requests something you want us to talk about, you can reach out on wpgears.com also if you leave us a review we would highly highly appreciate that. So wherever you listen to podcast Spotify uh Apple Android whatever um Stitcher leave us review. It helps us be found by other listeners out there that would find this information valuable and then that helps us want to continue to do this because obviously we don’t make money from this, we’re just putting out free content into the world. So we want to make sure it’s being listened to and utilized and enjoyed and stuff like that. So um yeah tomorrow we’re gonna be talking about should I use an appointment scheduling tool for prospective web design clients. So a lot of our listeners out there you guys are web designers creating websites for clients and should you use an appointment scheduling tool that’s what we’re going to talk about tomorrow. So until then take care bye-bye.