I'd be more than happy to help out with a donation, but I will not do so using PayPal. Would it be possible to provide alternative payment options?
Moderator JTH's Note: This discussion was split from the personal appeal for donations thread.
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You can use a credit card or debit card with PayPal without needing to sign up for an account. We can't take wire deposits as they cost more to process here in the states than we get from most donations. If you dislike PayPal for other reasons and have another recommendation of an alternative processor for folks who feel as you do, we'd be happy to look into it.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Not to be old fashioned or retro, but how about an organization name and address where one could just send a check or money order, or cash even?
In Holland we can use iDeal; which is apparently only for the Dutch banking system.
see:- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDEAL
Not sure if there are any other (international) possibilities out there?
I have tried once again using my PayPal account (since posting this a.m. below) but they will not allow me to make any payments (just using my one webbrowser and not any USB stick). They will not accept my Credit Card per sé. Sorry.
Maybe here are a couple of more possibilities John;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payment_Service_Provider
Likewise I will not use PayPal in any way. I do not like their business model, how they treat their customers and I simply don't trust them. They are unregulated and they do whatever they want.
I would gladly make a donation if you added support for Flattr, in fact I would love to see a Flattr button on the page of every app. Alternatively I would make a donation via Skrill (Moneybookers), they are similar to PayPal but at least they are regulated by the financial regulatory authorites in the U.K.
Flattr is unlikely as it winds up being hardly any money per click (I did the math on their released numbers of total money paid and total clicks) and, as most folks don't have accounts, the button winds up being more an ad for Flattr than anything else. Skrill has a name that just sounds untrustworthy, so it wouldn't leave the best impression on users.
We're looking at Amazon Payments or Google Payments as they are both trusted entities and nearly everyone has an account on them.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I donate to projects using Flattr; it is a bit disheartening to hear that a project doesn't want donations that are too small per click. I'm not particularly sure why that metric is significant.
"Most importantly, it will help us to pay for the increasing costs of bandwidth for software downloads as well as hosting our website, community forums and app store database"
The apps I've downloaded so far have come from sourceforge. If you are indeed hosting them then perhaps a .torrent dl would allow us to contribute bandwidth to the project.
Looks like your hosting service is running MS servers: ensuring HTTP Compression is working would help reduce the bandwidth on text-heavy areas of the site like forums.
A lot of the apps we have available are indeed available on SourceForge, but we also have a growing number of freeware apps.
Some freeware apps are hosted by the publisher on their own site; However, the majority are not. It is the downloads of those apps which are increasing the bandwidth costs significantly, not to mention the costs associated with hosting of the website itself, which is currently one of the top 6,100 websites worldwide, according to Alexa, meaning there are significant bandwidth costs related to hosting the site, regardless of the downloads.
It isn't that a project doesn't want donations, it's a matter of screen real estate we'd be devoting to a brand (Flattr) in exchange for just spare change. And, as the vast majority of folks don't have Flattr accounts already (their userbase is pretty small), it's essentially an ad for Flattr. An ad that they'd be paying us far less for than the small Google text ads we tuck away at the lower left of the page to help offset costs without being intrusive.
It would likely be a different story if the majority of folks had accounts (if it were connected to Google or Amazon or PayPal, for instance) and if it were far more transparent in the way it worked. Couple that with the facts that even the most popular projects that have Flattr struggle to get even 1,000 clicks, that those 'Flattrs' represent one-time micro-donations not ongoing support which is a bit misleading, and that Flattr usage has been trending downward according to most everyone I've talked to or read about (try browsing the activity logs of all the big projects) and Flattr seems like a losing proposition.
Either way, Flattr is a bit of a distraction from this post and comments. If you'd like to discuss it further, please post a note in the General Discussion forum rather than replying here and I'll be happy to link to examples of other projects and provide the numbers I used to do the calculations (once I can find them as it was last year).
As for the bandwidth, SourceForge hosts our open source download files for free. We pay to host our website on a dedicated server with Rackspace, have our images (including logos, icons and screenshots) on a Rackspace content delivery network for fast downloading, and host the majority of the freeware downloads in the Rackspace server cloud (a few publishers self-host, but we host the vast majority of it). Torrent isn't really an option as most users now download via the PortableApps.com Platform and building in torrent support would make it more likely to be blocked at universities and corporations. This website is hosted on Red Hat Enterprise Linux using Drupal as the content management system. We compress cached web pages, combine CSS files for less connections, and combine+Minify+gzip Javascript files. If you have any other suggestions or questions regarding hosting, please post a note in our General Discussion forum so we can avoid straying off-topic here. If you have any ideas we haven't yet implemented, we'd love to hear them. Thanks!
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Sorry, but I have the same objection to PayPal as a payment processor for both donations and purchasing the USB drive.
You said "You can use a credit card or debit card with PayPal without needing to sign up for an account." - this may be true for US residents, but not for the rest of the world.
For example, at checkout for the USB drive, under the "Don't have a PayPal account? Pay with your credit or debit card", try changing country to "Australia" and see what happens. The form totally changes to something evilly intrusive:
1. PayPal demands "Please enter your FULL LEGAL NAME ...First name, Middle name (s), Last name" - this is never required by other payment processors. Other payment processors only require the form of name that corresponds to what is printed on the credit card, such as initial + surname.
2. PayPal demands "Residential address":
"Please note we do not accept PO Boxes. If we are unable to match your address against Australia Post records, we may ask you to verify it by providing documentation."
PayPal demands this even though many credit card customers correctly have PO boxes registered with their credit card providers as their credit card billing address; PayPal forces them to put a different address which is NOT their credit card billing address. Only PayPal demands residential addresses in this way; no other payment processor does.
3. If these details are supplied, then on the following page PayPal demands date of birth - no other payment processor demands this, and PayPal falsely states that the Australian government MANDATES collection of this. For a credit card payment, this is absolutely false.
If the customer continues to push through this PayPal swamp, they can make the payment but it then becomes clear that PayPal has retained all the transaction details including the full credit card details and then sends a series of manipulative e-mails trying to oblige the purchaser to provide a password and, if they do, they end up with a PayPal account pre-populated with all this personal data that PayPal captured for nothing but a simple purchase. PayPal keeps this data in its records for a very long time; they still have it more than a year later even if the customer does not create a PayPal account, ready for a future account creation. PayPal does not declare that it undertakes this data retention; the customer is not told. In the EU, this would probably breach a bunch of laws.
If the customers does relent and allow creation of a PayPal account, after a month or so of no account activity, no payments, PayPal begins a very targeted campaign involving lying to the customer in order to manipulate the customer into getting "verified", something totally unnecessary in order to make simple credit card payments. The actual wording used by PayPal in this e-mail campaign is as follows:
"Subject: Final reminder: Your account will remain limited until we hear from you
Dear [name],
We emailed you a short while ago to help us resolve an issue with your
PayPal account. Your account was temporarily limited as a security measure and full access has not been restored yet because we haven't heard from you.
We understand it may be frustrating not to have full access to your PayPal account and need to work with you to resolve the issue and restore full access to your account as quickly as possible.
What's the issue?
We noticed some unusual activity on a credit card linked to your PayPal
account."
Note that last statement: PayPal are falsely claiming that they can see into the customer's credit card account. This is absolutely a lie. PayPal does not have the ability to do this; the customer has not provided PayPal with access to that account, but PayPal claims to have it.
PayPal is attempting to scare and manipulate the customer into a deeper relationship with them, and they just don't stop. PayPal continue for years, literally, sending these threatening e-mails containing untruths. And they has been doing this for at least half a decade.
PayPal has had regulatory action taken against its practices in Australia in the past, but not enough, it appears.
PayPal is a very nasty operation that many people refuse to support. I cannot think of a worse payment processor. This is a huge barrier to people's purchasing your USB keys.
A lot of companies here in America now require your real name and real address for doing business due to fraud. Fraud is a huge issue online, even with all the high barriers to entry you see in PayPal (real name, real address, etc), we still get a lot of fraudulent donations of people testing credit cards or testing PayPal accounts (likely stolen accounts purchased elsewhere) to see if they work. All of those fraudulent donations wind up costing us money for chargebacks. The same would apply even if we had our own merchant account and accepted debit and credit directly. Even if we have CustomUSB switch payment providers for our USB drives, we likely will not ship to PO Boxes, also due to fraud (shipments to a PO Box outside the US have a much higher fraud rate than shipments to physical addresses).
That said, I was unaware of the other issues you mentioned with PayPal. They're by far the world's largest payment processor, so we went with them as they were easy to setup and most other open source projects use them (including all of SourceForge). So, if you had any of those experiences with them as a result of trying to donate to us, please accept my apologies.
We're in the process of setting up Amazon and/or Google Payments and will likely have them online this week. I'll be sure and post a note here as well as the homepage as soon as they are.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I am sympathetic to the fraud issue.
My understanding is that a transaction in which there is one credit card billing address and a different shipping address is more likely fraudulent; our delivery address is always the same as the credit card billing address, and payment processors and merchants all over the world don't seem to find this a problem on individual transactions.
Google Checkout/Wallet seems OK, and does not ask the intrusive questions PayPal does.
Neither did SWREG/Digital River last time we used them for buying software.
The way PayPal operates is glaringly different from other payment processors, with their intrusive questions and their hidden agenda of trying to force a simple one-time purchaser into becoming a captive PayPal customer.
I think PayPal are serving no-one but themselves by acting this way. Unless someone really does intend to use PayPal long-term (and link bank accounts for receiving payments), PayPal really do not have a way of verifying either the "full name" nor the "residential address" nor the "date of birth" given to them. They do happily open accounts where these are all fake, and there seems to be no detection nor repercussions. PayPal are not protecting the merchants such as CustomUSB on individual transactions by doing this. Our experience with PayPal customer service (we get directed to the Philippines call centre) is that either the call centre rep is robotic and unhelpful, or the rep will give helpful advice on how to get around PayPal's inflexibility, such as by signing up with one address and then logging in and changing it to the real address we want. To me, PayPal is just despicable.
I cannot see how PayPal are protecting merchants like this, but there is massive information asymmetry on financial fraud rates and conditions under which it occurs, and they and other payment processors would know the facts and we can only guess.
I did not get far enough with the USB drive purchase to find out that CustomUSB won't ship to a PO box. This is a further barrier, although I don't think it needs to be.
The kneejerk reach-for-Fedex/UPS/DHL seems to be part of American business culture for shipment, but there are alternatives, and cheaper ones, especially for something small like a USB drive. The postal systems have a number of different "signature required" delivery options which are also cheaper (CustomUSB freight is really expensive on such a small item). Incidentally, Australian post offices and the postal system are government-owned, and ID and *real* address verification is required prior to renting a PO box. For small business people who are out on the road, having a post box allows us to collect mail at our convenience, and not when a courier truck arrives at random. After a couple of futile delivery attempts, the couriers return the shipment to sender, in any case; at best they oblige us to visit their depot, usually a long way away, to pick up the item. This is just bad business for everyone.)
These Fedex/UPS/DHL courier companies cannot deliver to PO boxes but there is a perfectly good courier system that can, called EMS http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Express_Mail_Service run by agreement amongst international postal systems. You lodge the shipment at a post office, it goes in an EMS satchel, and it gets delivered (audit trail and signature-required) by the postal system at the destination, including to a PO box. It is just like the private couriers, but has that advantage.
But there are cheaper postal methods via the postal system. Most Australian customers would rather pay a reasonable price than pay premium rates for a perceived faster courier delivery that comes with inflexibility.
I know from first-hand experience that fraud rates are higher than people expect. I've built custom web ecommerce solutions before. What most end-users don't realize is that the business has to eat all the fraudulent charges. Anytime a credit card is stolen or a customer does a chargeback just because they don't want to pay, the business just loses all that money and the merchandise from the sale. Plus a $20-$30 chargeback fee. Most regular folks don't think about this because their credit carts are 'guaranteed safe' and they aren't responsible for fraudulent charges. What they don't realize is that even though it's the businesses paying for their credit cards via the transaction fees, the credit card companies don't care about the businesses at all and anything that goes wrong comes out of the business' pocket.
At the time I built my first ecommerce system, there were no fraud detection rules, so we came up with some through trial and error based on first-hand experience. The PO Box rule was one of them (in addition to things like different billing-shipping, etc). And it is pretty common through a lot of businesses. PO boxes are uncommon through most of the US, so businesses don't like them. Plus, Fedex (standard, not ground) and several other shippers won't deliver to them as they aren't physical addresses. Plus, the business has no idea who they are actually delivering to and the post office's privacy rules won't let the business find out.
As for the shipping rates with CustomUSB, they're built to be an average of the countries shipped to most frequently with a built-in overage amount to account for the fraud we'll encounter with those countries. We can't ship insured/signature/confirmed delivery to most of those countries (as it's either not available or WAY more expensive than customers will put up with), so it's self-insurance. And, with each fraudulent order, CustomUSB loses that piece of merchandise, is out the fee they paid to ship it, and is then hit with the chargeback fee. So, we have to distribute that cost across all the other customers.
As an example: generally, businesses have Fedex, UPS, DHL or the US Post Office available for shipment options. US Post Office would then use your postal system directly. The cheapest insured option to ship a flash drive insured from here to Australia via the US Post Office is US$20.21 using their online calculator for standard mailing (the lowest-quality service with insurance available as an add-on). Note that this is more than the $14.99 currently charged by CustomUSB for shipping to Australia as we were able to do it cheaper by shipping uninsured and self-insuring. We try to keep it down as much as possible and even dropped the rate from where they started at with my assistance in calculating potential fraud and average shipping rates.
In the end, we're doing the best we can within an imperfect system and try to keep costs down and convenience up whenever possible. As mentioned in my previous message, we'll have an alternative to PayPal available for donations in the coming days. And I'll be speaking with CustomUSB about offering an alternate payment option as well.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
John,
Thanks for your detailed thoughts. It is dismaying how common fraud is, what a frictional cost it is on doing business, and how the financial institutions don't have an incentive to fight it with better products when they can just transfer the risk to other parties.
You're welcome. And you're right, it is a shame. But, sadly, the major credit card companies have an oligopoly and no incentive to change how they do business. They charge higher transaction fees to businesses than they could in a competitive market (keeping some and giving some to credit-card holders as 'cash back'), won't let small businesses charge a fee to credit card purchases to compensate for the credit card fees (forcing them to raise prices slightly across the board for all purchases to make it up), and then take no responsibility for fraudulent use of their products and just pushing it all back on the businesses. Even customers who engage in chargeback abuse (they ordered the product, received the product and signed for the product but decided to do a chargeback), they don't care about. So, until we have market disruption from players like Square, Google, Amazon, Apple and, yes, even Paypal, the situation is what it is and we do our best to work within it to keep prices fair and treat customers/users/donors/friends/awesome-peeps right.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Apologies in advance, as I am new here and don't want to derail a thread that's already months old by now. But I noticed that the most recent reply was from a week ago, so here goes. A little off-topic, but --
If you look at the bottom of the page of any of these payment providers (like PayPal) it says that personal data is required because of the USA PATRIOT Act. The USA PATRIOT Act has been one of the most controversial pieces of legislation in all of American history. Many believe it is a step towards turning the Land of the Free into an Orwellian police/surveillance state, aka the Military Industrial Complex that of all people, General -- General! as in a military man himself! -- Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about while he was President!
Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act
Have you looked into setting up a merchant account with MerchantInc.com as suggested on the popular anti-Paypal website ScrewPaypal.com? Or a project with Kickstarter or IndieGogo? Kickstarter helped to launch the groundbreaking open-source PRIVATE Facebook adaptation Diaspora. Portable Apps has plenty of users and popularity by now, so I see no reason why it wouldn't do well on a crowdfunding website -- Diaspora was basically started from scratch (although it did end up getting a donation from none other than Zuckerberg himself, oddly enough). then again, I don't know how funds are exchanged on Kickstarter or Indiegogo either, whether they use Paypal too or not. But either of these might be worth looking into.
Unfortunately, you generally need a sellable product in order to do a KickStarter (since that is what it is designed for). It's not designed for ongoing fundraising activities and specifically has rules against this. We might be able to do it in conjunction with a platform release, but I think a large percentage of our userbase would have issues with that.
On the personal information side... as a general rule, we don't want donations from people who won't give out their personal information (name and address) as these transactions have an exceedingly high fraud rate. Every one of them that is faked and accepted because we're not checking addresses against the credit card company's address verification will result in a chargeback and cost us $20 each, easily wiping out any gains we get by allowing people to donate without their name or address.
Even without the Patriot act, we'd ask for name and address anyway as otherwise you wind up losing money. I've been working on ecommerce sites for over 10 years. Fraud is a bigger problem than you would expect, and all of it winds up being paid for by businesses (not the credit card companies or consumers). Even though you're protected from fraud by your credit company, it doesn't come out of the credit card company's pocket when someone uses your card fraudulently. Whatever business they ordered from has to pay for it in terms of losing the product to whoever paid for it with the stolen card and then paying a chargeback fee on top of it. About 2-3% of the price of everything you buy online goes towards credit card fees and another 1%+ goes toward paying for the fraud committed by other folks.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
You raise some good points. Have you had a look at MerchantInc.com?
Source: ScrewPayPal.com
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paypal#Criticism_and_litigation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_on-line_payment_service_providers
Kickstarter uses Amazon Payments for its credit card transactions, and nothing else, and I believe their terms require an actual product being produced.
Indiegogo is a little more free both in terms and payments (they also directly process credit cards).
In both cases though, funds would be lost through fees.
I'm not sure what level Kickstarter fees are at, butIndiegogo charge 4-9% of the total donations depending on success/failure of the project.EDIT: Kickstarter charge 5% flat if successful + 3-5% payment processing fee.
As promised, we have added a PayPal alternative for users who are unwilling or unable to use PayPal. Amazon Payments is now live on both the Donate and Sponsor pages.
Donate | Sponsor
Thank you for your donations and support!
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
It turns out that Amazon Payments may not be used by open source projects seeking donations or 'Pay What You Want' style commerce (ala Radiohead's album releases) due to restrictions in their agreements with payment processors. It can only be used for real physical/virtual goods where everyone is charged the same price for the same service or for donations for 501c3 non-profit charities. So, Amazon Payments has been removed as an option and we are looking into other global alternatives.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
... but also Moneybookers/Skrill was mentioned somewhere, and they seem, acting more like a bank, totally above board - so suggest you check them out.
greetings - heinz -
Hi John,
I think it might be worth a look at Dwolla to solve your donation payment woes. Its a super cheap per transaction service that is really taking off with small businesses that have low value transactions as there is a flat fee for anything above $10 and I believe free below that. There is also a payment gateway option that would allow you to use any backend here, http://blog.dwolla.com/integration-highlight-spreedly-core-2/
The only thing I'm not sure of yet is whether they support international accounts, but with the payment gateway's support of so many providers I'm sure you could get a few set up.
We use PayPal not because people can pay with PayPal accounts, but because people can pay with their credit cards directly. Sadly, Dwolla doesn't seem to have this. It supports peer to peer payments based on linked bank accounts. This may have appeal for some international users who use bank transfers normally, though (we don't do those here in the US as the fees are incredibly high).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Can I have a mailing address to send payment of donation to. I do not have access to Paypal debit or credit card. I am on SSDI. I had my ID stolen a few years ago when TJMax got debit and credit card customer information stolen and ended up paying out nearly half my yearly income. I won't ever be able to recover from the hit I took from the thieves and TD Bank. So if I could send a Cashiers check directly to you to your business address it would be more convenient for me to pay you.
The information is available under About Us and then Contact.
And here is a direct link.
It amazes me that on the internet you can be anything you want, and yet so many people still choose to be idiots.
Our address is changing, so checks should not be sent to the listed address. We'll have a new one posted in January.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I find your reviews of both Flattr and Skrill to be a bit, well picky maybe. If you ask most projects that use Flattr along with other donation methods I think you'll find that projects do far better with Flattr. Personally I would click a Flattr button over any other donation method purely from it's ease of use. If someone clicks a Flattr button they will be prompted to login to Flattr, if they don't have an account they'll be prompted to create one and deposit funds. Yes there are far fewer people with Flattr accounts over PayPal but Flattr is growing fast and surely any donations are good donations.
As regard Skrill, I don't understand you're point, you think the same sounds untrustworthy? That doesn't make sense. Skrill is a long established payments service and was the only competing service to PayPal for a long time. Unlike PayPal, Skrill is actually regulated by the U.K. financial regulatory authorities, and somehow this is untrustworthy. How about you actually contact Flattr and Skrill and talk to them first to find out what they offer and how they can help you.
To put it another way, I will donate via Flattr or Skrill, and maybe other services. But not with PayPal. So you can be picky about the services you accept and get some donations, or embrace many services and get more donations (mine included).
My Flattr review is based on the actual performance of the highest-grossing projects I know of using Flattr. Each of those Flattr clicks you see represents pennies on average. And the numbers are an all-time total. Not daily, weekly, monthly or even yearly. So that top project with 1,000 Flattrs they've gotten over the years they've had a big Flattr button in the header of their website has likely been paid under US$40 per year for it. That essentially makes it out to be a very cheap ad for Flattr. For comparison, a google ad in the same position on our site would make more than that in less than a day (not that we'd want to have an ad there). And, to put these figures in perspective, our monthly hosting/bandwidth costs are now around $3,000 a month. Couple that with the fact that, as seen in other projects' Flattr logs, Flattr appears to be in decline. Flattr may be a good way for bloggers to make some spare change on an article here and there (Flattr is designed for donating $0.01 for an article according to the Flattr About page), but it is a poor way for an open source project to raise money. The Flattr logs for every single open source and similar project I've looked at back this up. The fact that the Flattr is loathe to ever talk actual money and the Flattr blog hasn't highlighted a single 'success story' in all of 2012 bears that out, too. I'd be happy to see real data that contradicts this.
As for Skrill, the name likely carries some weight in the UK and I'm not arguing that point. Here in the US, it's meaningless, other than the fact that skrill/skrilla is slang for money. The problem is the connections that go along with that slang use. People expect skrill to be a word used by a drug dealer on the hit TV series Breaking Bad (as a fan of the show, I can assure you it is used in this fashion on the show), not a site they'd trust with their own funds for a donation or purchase. It could be that the word is used differently in the UK, but that isn't the case here. That's the issue with Skrill. Nothing against the business itself or its regulation. I'd wager it will never catch on in the US strictly because of the connection its name represents.
As for other alternatives, we've already begun implementation of one and will have it live in January. It supports direct use of US and most International debit and credit cards without any need to sign up for an account. We will likely make it our payment processor of choice. We will continue to support PayPal alongside it for folks who want to use PayPal funds or prefer to use a more recognized name as well.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Regarding Skrill, I'd say that unless it brings some negative "publicity" (for lack of a better word) to the website, you should try it.
Previously known as kAlug.
Skrill is a quite pricey compared to other solutions. Each donation/sponsorship would cost us US$0.46 plus 3.9% of the transaction with Skrill compared to US$0.30 plus 2.9% of the transaction with PayPal. Skrill would also cost us US$26.38 a month (US$316.56 per year) just to operate the account and an additional US$2.38 every time we transfer money from the account to our bank. PayPal has no monthly fee and transfers to your bank are free.
So, as an example, if we were to raise $10,000 over 6 months (covering a good part of the $18k we'd spend on hosting/bandwidth for those same months) with an average donation of $20, it would cost us $440 through PayPal, but would cost us $792.56 through Skrill. If we only made Skrill available as a secondary option to PayPal for people who wanted to use it, the fees would eat up a very large percentage of those donations.
I'm looking at Stripe as a payment processing alternative to PayPal at the moment to introduce in the coming weeks. It has the same fees as PayPal ($0.30 per transaction plus 2.9%, no monthly or transfer fees) and lets folks pay with a credit card directly without any account to sign up for.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Yeah, that would be a big problem.
It seems Google has (or had) a payment processor too; have you looked at it?
Stripe seems to be a nice alternative.
Previously known as kAlug.
Google won't let you accept payments without an actual physical or virtual good exchanging hands unless you are a registered non-profit charity.
I am rethinking Skrill a bit as, looking into it more, it does support quite a lot of local payment options that no one else seems to.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Couldn't you just sell "tool points" (or whatever you might want to call it)--some sites use Google Wallet for this already (not that the "points" actually equate to anything). Maybe... buy enough points, get a "free" USB drive... or something (but make it fun & original
).
You could "sell" donation badges (of course, you'd have to create donation badges [concept/process] first**).
Happy Almost Ninth Anniversary BTW
(**because you don't appear to have a way to associate a donation with an account?)
good info on the payments. i was under the assumption that PayPal took the first $1 of any transaction, which another software maker clsimed a few years ago. Still i think you should look into Dwolla for U.S. customers at least as they say its just 25 cents fee for transactions over $10 and no fees for below $10. and their website mentions stuff about developers, non-profit donations, businesses, etc.
would be good if the PortableApps program could be kind of an easy way to donate funds to the smaller freeware developers as well.
Dwolla is kind of like very old-school PayPal where you can only pay if you have a Dwolla account and have linked it to your bank account. Unfortunately, they don't do credit card or debit card processing, which is how most folks pay for things. At least from what I have read about them before and what I see on their site. Thank you for the suggestion, though.
We make donation buttons available on the app homepages for freeware and open source devs and link where they have it available. We're adding it into the PA.c Platform as well soon.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
No, Dwolla is a vast improvement over PayPal and credit cards. The latter are old school and both prone to fraud. Dwolla is new school and safe.
PayPal is not a bank. PayPal can walk away with your balance, legally. Ripoff stories have no end. Visit paypalsucks.com to see why eBay and PayPal JD's and MBA's are your worry, not Bulgarian hackers. Dwolla was founded by a small merchant, not a lawyer.
Signing with PayPal is 100x harder than Dwolla. From a Dwolla customer p.o.v., the big signup hassle has already happened at the BANK. Dwolla lets the BANK know its customer. Dwolla just asks an account number. More people have BANK accounts than cards. And with Dwolla, the risk of credit card fraud is nil.
The whole cc biz is a legal, criminal fraud bigger than the nations of Bulgaria and Russia combined. Moving electronic blips should cost pennies, not 3-4% of every transaction on the globe.
Money ultimately moves between bank accounts whether a cc mediates or not. Dwolla removes the middle-men, their tolls, and all the wiggle-room that hackers exploit (chargebacks, etc.). It's nothing like a bank wire transfer in cost or complexity; less than a postage stamp and some mouse clicks. It's something like an electronic check, but much safer; the funds are guaranteed to clear.
Merchants should take money in as many ways as possible. Any salesman knows the strategy. Arguing one or the other down is like turning people away for bad hair. Just take their money and smile.
In the US, at least, giving out your credit card information is relatively risk-free. Giving out your bank account information is something you NEVER do.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
I believe you hold false assumptions formed around wrong first impressions. Maybe you're following crowds and assuming mass intelligence over mass marketing.
Bank info is filed with Dwolla once, and only Dwolla, not in every purchase incident or with every merchant. PayPal takes bank account info too.
Dwolla partners with banks to rewrite the old school bank interchange systems for much higher security. They are really really keen on it and actually doing something WITH the banks.
Giving out cc info is the most dangerous thing anybody in the US does online. A bank account can only drain to zero. CCs can send you into the high-interest red (a cc loan). Even brick-and-mortar retail store clerks have lifted cc numbers for personal use or criminal resale, never mind online hackers.
More to my point, cc's are pure crime without illegal use. Focus on hacker danger is misplaced compared to the issue of 3.5% of every sale versus 25 cents flat fee.
I'm aware you only give your bank account info to Dwolla, but that doesn't matter. I'm guessing you're not from the US, so you don't know how the laws work here.
In the US, almost no one is going to give their bank account info to Dwolla. When giving out your bank account info, someone can take ALL your money from your bank account. Here in the US, we have consumer protection laws around credit cards so our liability is generally limited to $50 by law, even if someone racks up $50,000 in charges after stealing your card. Most credit card companies have zero personal liability as a way to show they are better than other cards (you don't even have to pay the $50). So, credit cards are completely safe for the consumer. Bank accounts are not. As a result, for the most part, no one here in the US gives out their bank account information.
In the end, it doesn't matter that Dwolla saves us 45 cents on a $10 donation if 95% of people won't give out their bank account information to Dwolla just to donate to us (which they will have to as chances are they don't have a Dwolla account). People donating via PayPal have no such worry as they don't even need to setup a PayPal account to donate to us. They just use their credit card or debit card just like they do every day on every single other online site.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Your market assessment is wrong. PayPal says linked bank accounts are its most popular option. "Linking your bank account to your PayPal account is the most popular way to add money to your PayPal balance."
I am aware of cc popularity. It is worldwide. Consider PayPal's youth, and rapid popularity, before dismissing the new kid on the block. People are clearly going hog-wild linking their bank accounts to PayPal.
PayPal is legally/technially not a US bank and therefore lacks US consumer protections. Dwolla can't be worse.
Yes, fraud victims have some cc laws to use - if they can afford the legal help it takes to get them enfoced - if they haven't signed away rights in ToS from PayPal or the CC firm. Did you read PayPalSucks horror stories of theft by PayPal ITSELF? Consumer protections exist for bank accounts as well as cc's. PayPal has artfully skirted them, giving itself authority to take your funds.
You are really stretching things, I think, to score small points. Anyone who has dealt with Big Three credit agencies knows the impossible battle to clear a credit report even with truth on your side. You are lucky to get it done WITH A LAWYER.
Dwolla is going gangbusters without your support into hundreds of millions, in partnership with actual banks and their computer networking/security teams; I'm not interested to win you over. You clearly have a block. I don't think it's that the market won't give Dwolla bank numbers, but just you, personally, in turn projecting on others without homework on actual stats.
Truth be told, mobile phone payment systems will conquer the world next. They are already de rigeur in parts of Africa and Asia. The US is not very far along but Dwolla has them covered, too.
For someone so very keen on cc's I recommend a jolly merchant account! Then you don't have PayPal fees in the middle. If you want to save pennies on small donations with cc's, a merchant account is the way to go.
Thanks John and I appreciate the interest and hope donations ramp up.
Most folks donating to us are donating via credit card. And most of them don't have PayPal accounts. We're not using PayPal so people can donate via their PayPal account that they uploaded money to. We're using PayPal just to do the credit card processing. The fact that you can also donate via a PayPal account itself is just an extra. If we weren't using PayPal for credit card processing, we likely would not sign up for and accept PayPal payments in addition to that.
Credit card protections are that good here in the US. I have multiple friends who have had their cards stolen - one from a restaurant waiter stealing numbers, a few from hacked websites - in each case, none of them had any liability. The protections for consumers on credit cards are very good. The reason for this is that all the liability falls on the merchant accepting those cards when a stolen or duplicated card is used. I'm very familiar with this as I started building ecommerce websites from scratch back in the 90s.
I'm exploring adding a merchant account, but it doesn't save any money. You still need a payment gateway to connect to said merchant account and the fees for the merchant account + payment gateway are about the same as PayPal, so there's no real savings there. The only thing it would accomplish is to let people who avoid PayPal be able to use their credit cards without giving the details to PayPal.
We'll likely add some additional donation options, but I don't plan on adding Dwolla at the moment. I'm not very keen on giving my bank account details to a company that doesn't even list a physical address on their website (note the lack of an About Us, Contact Us or similar on Dwolla.com).
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
with Mr Haller. I do have a Paypal account, that is NOT tied to a bank account. From my standpoint (as someone who has had fraudulent charges made on my account from some fool in the Ukraine), I will never give my bank account info to any web site. There is no safety in it. If the wrong person gets that info, they can clean you out.
In my case, I got my money back, but not before having my checking account overdrafted for almost an entire month. Imagine living paycheck to paycheck, when your direct deposit is going into this account that is negative because some fool hacked it. Not fun. Sorry, but for us in the US, this is the way it has to be. It's just too risky otherwise.
Bill G.
Frozen St. Paul, MN
land of the frozen mosquito
We've added WePay as a donation option on the Donation page in addition to PayPal. It allows donations using major credit cards now as either one-time or monthly donations. We'll hopefully be able to accept bank transfers soon.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!