On 8/12/07, Sebastian Moleski <sebmol(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 8/12/07, Mark Ryan <ultrablue(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> I've heard a lot of horror stories about Paypal.
Most of the horror stories about Paypal are from the early days,
and/or from tiny businesses with grey-area business practices.
And
considering that
by using PayPal, we're basically paying eBay a percentage of donations
we receive, I reckon it'd be a good idea to look at alternatives every
now and then. Now that Wikimedia has hit the big time, our support for
any particular payment method may actually become important.
When you accept credit cards, a percentage goes to VISA, Mastercard, etc.,
another percentage to your merchant account provider. How's that different
from Paypal/eBay taking a cut?
Merchant accounts are often cheaper, but they also are often harder to
manage than paypal, especially when dealing with people in so many
countries, using so many different currencies, etc.
Either way, the question that should drive our
decision regarding available
payment methods is fairly simple: what methods do a significant number of
donors (or a few donors with donations of a significant amount) prefer? If
it's Paypal, that's what we ought to have. If it's checks, money orders,
wires, debit transfers, credit cards, debit cards, Moneybookers, gift cards,
etc. then we ought to offer those too.
Support for micropayments is a cool feature, and something which isn't
really offered by paypal. Then again, the impact such a feature would
have on foundation revenue would probably be small percentagewise.
If I were King of Wikipedia I'd probably try out amazon's payment
system for the cool factor, to have a readily available backup, and
just to learn more about micropayments, but not for financial reasons.
I'm a big fan of trying out new stuff.