Check out a review of PayPals service and learn how it rates compared to other services.
When it comes to ecommerce, online auctions, and working/getting paid online PayPal has become the standard, but how exactly does it stack up. In this review we will evaluate the PayPal service based on four key elements: ease of use, customization and special features, customer service, and lastly transaction time.
| Ease of Use: | Rating  |
Off all the payment gateway and ecommerce payment solutions available today PayPal is perhaps the easiest to use. Whether you are an independent contractor who wishes to simply email a request for payment or if you want to build a store with multiple items PayPal. Everything that you need is easily accessible from the tabs along the top of the page and the user friendly help section gives you simple, easy to understand instructions for using all of the functions available with PayPal. They also make adding the PayPal option for your buyers to your web site as simple as copying and pasting a few lines of code; so for ease of use, PayPal gets a top notch 5 star rating.
| Customization and Special Features: | Rating |
PayPal also gets a 5 star rating for its great variety of features such as the one that allows you to not only set up payment options for single items or one time billing but with the easy to use features available you can also choose to sell subscriptions or collect donations. You can create custom invoices and even choose a style of PayPal buttons that can blend into the look and feel of your site.
| Customer Service: | Rating  |
While PayPal offers a very valuable utility, their customer service is less than desirable. They are rather slow to respond and may or may not offer any real resolution for your problems. And if you happen to be one of the unfortunate random souls that are subject to an account freeze for further verification or to check out a transaction you may be waiting some length of time. Also, if you do have a disputed transaction, standard operating procedure is to let the transaction precede while it is being investigated; if their investigation decides that the transaction was indeed unauthorized they will then refund the money; however, this could cause several problems in the interim especially if it is a large amount in question. So for customer service they get a 2 star rating.
| Timeliness of Transactions: | Rating |
Lastly we come to the amount of time that it takes for PayPal to process a transaction. On this issue they are getting a 5 star rating because you can easily initiate a transaction online and have it immediately processed and transfera into your bank account are typically processed on PayPal's end the same business day.
Of all the payment options available for web developers, I definitely recommend using PayPal above all of the others.
To learn more about PayPal and other payment gateway options check out the following articles:
What Are Payment Gateways and How Can You Use Them on Your Site?
How to Use PayPal to Collect Payments
How to Create and Add a PayPal Donation Button to Drupal Part 1
Tighten down your PayPal account with the new Security Key