No Merchant accounts come close to Paypal at the moment
Love it or hate it Paypal is the best option for selling on ebay.
I have done a great deal of reading the last days as if I could find a credible option for receiving payments when selling on ebay I would do it.
The big disadvantages of merchant accounts are the extra fees such as
Set up Fee
Management Fee (call it what you want, a monthly fee to "manage" your account.
Problems with integration with ebay leading to the user having to manually send everything. What a pain.
Paypal on the other hand is Free to set up. Yes the transaction fees are high but you pay transaction fees with the merchants aswell. No management fee.
The easy integration with ebay makes payments automatic, and I dont know about you butI havent got time to mess about manually doing everything.
Obviously the biggest Disadvantage with Paypal is the fact that a limitation basically kills your sales and you can forget about your ebay account unless of course you want to call them and then fax every document you own.
The best we can hope for is that in the future there is a legal ruling that ebay open up and allow users to use other payment processors. Something along the lines where Microsoft where ordered to other companies to have input into the software options offered. (I remember a big fuss about something to do with windows media player)
However this ever happening is unlikely as ebay like microsoft have millions to pour into lawyers to block anything they dont like.
But for now, if you sell on ebay, Paypal is the answer. I wish the answer was different but at the moment its not!
|