is it A) legal and B) possible in Shopify to charge a fee (based on cart total) if the buyer chooses PayPal as the payment option? to cover the higher fees.
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Hi there, @iniudicatus !
Welcome to the Community! Definitely a great place to gather some input regarding anything about the platform!
With regards to your inquiry, the cost of providing more payment providers to your customers so they have more options to pay for your products is definitely something you have to consider if you are finding the fees of PayPal to be high. PayPal provides your customers who do not have credit cards or other forms of traditional banking a way to complete their purchase.
As for using PayPal to pay for your Shopify bill, please refer to the screenshot below and from this help document as well for further information:
Are you able to tell me more about your business? Where are you located? What sort of products are you selling? How is everything going that you are considering this query?
Also, as an alternative, you can simply adjust all your product prices to ensure they are covering your business costs, PayPal fees included. To do so specifically when a customer uses a certain gateway does not bode well for a consistent buyer experience. It might do more harm than good, especially when customers start to notice.
I am looking forward to hearing more from you.
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Cheers, Daniel. I agree, different prices at checkout would make for an inconsistent buyer experience.
My business is arts & crafts supplies mainly. Shopify going well, just the issue of traffic to handle.
From a business perspective, I hate PayPal. I think it is a ridiculously overcharged payment provider. That they no longer refund fees, even after a merchant performs a legally mandated refund upon a cancellation, is, quite frankly, cheeky of them. They skirt the boundaries of my patience. I have to check each transaction to ensure they have not ripped me off on fees. They refuse to allow withdrawals of any currency to any ‘virtual bank’ despite that they, themselves, are a virtual bank - essentially they don’t want money to be transferred to their competitors.
So I will keep PayPal off the shop for as long as I can and the sooner they go out of business the better.
Another reason I asked this initial question is that I see in Germany there is a practice of offering payment discounts for payments by bank transfer. So perhaps that is someting that could be facilitated via discount codes or gift vouchers, so the consistency of the buyer’s experience is not damaged.
Thanks for the comment. Have a nice day.
Thank you for the added information, @iniudicatus .
The way I see your situation, why not simply raise the price of your products across to board to cover all possible gateways your customers will use? I am suggesting this because if someone is willing to pay a certain price for your products, others will as well. I definitely understand wanting to cover fees on your end but I can’t imagine the prices being so different from each other?
However, you are more than welcome to go the discount route as well. I have included some discount apps that allow you some freedom to dictate how you want them to be applied in your store:
Definitely let me know how these work out for what you are after. Also, feel free to share more about the traffic you are seeing on your end. Any information you can share will help us understand your situation better.
Looking forward to hearing more from you.
Thanks for the response, Daniel.
I would liken it to having an option to pay a utility bill by Direct Debit and receive a discount because it costs less for them to process the remittance.
For PayPal, the fees are usually higher than other payment gateways, and they do not refund fees on cancellations/withdrawals that EU and UK merchants are legally obligated to faciitate. Overall it costs more taking payments via PayPal and I don’t want the customers not using PayPal to pay the price of that by my having a flat pricing structure. It might be only a tiny amount, but that can be the difference between getting a sale or not if my competitor is close to me on price.
I will check out the apps. Thank you for your advice, Daniel.