pay in with PayPal

[chadwhitacre]

was: pay in and out with paypal

Since we now do PayPal payouts (though it's a second-class option), let's refocus this ticket on PayPal for payins. Currently closed but we do get requests for this so it's worth tracking somewhere. Who knows?

I usually link to #63 (comment) to explain why this is closed.

Want to back this issue? Post a bounty on it! We accept bounties via Bountysource.

[singpolyma]

+1

[chadwhitacre]

I'd like someone with PayPal experience to champion this and/or #186 ("pay with paypal"). I'm not comfortable enough with them to trust that we're not going to get totally burned. With Balanced and Dwolla we have the companies themselves providing integration so the trust level is as high as can be.

[chadwhitacre]

Would like to investigate this claim more:

users continue to overwhelmingly prefer credit card checkout

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/06/stripe-and-ab-testing-made-me-a-small-fortune/

[fmaida]

+1

[chadwhitacre]

I poked at the payout side of this a bit now that #126 has more or less stalled. I gather that the Adaptive Payments API is the one we'd use, probably just with Gittip as the buyer and recipients as the seller. I got bogged down in the crusty sandbox setup and am leaving off for now.

[abnor]

Messaged [email protected] to try and figure out some kinks we can get around.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @abnor on #692.

[chadwhitacre]

Messaged [email protected] to try and figure out some kinks we can get around.

@abnor Awesome! Keep us posted. :)

[abnor]

Spam.

I've got an appointment with a Paypal "SENIOR MANAGER, NORTH AMERICAN PARTNERSHIPS" dude on Friday morning~ I'll practice spilling the details and testing my knowledge here. Feel free to add to or correct my script!

"...talking, talking, so Gittip is a philanthropic website that aims to pool generous and selfless individuals and to direct support to individuals who take on pro bono projects. The payments are processed through a third party and the givers and receivers have to connect their credit card or bank account. However, not everybody has a card or bank and so we are missing out on a large amount of internet and international individuals. We know many of them use Paypal on a regular basis, so we figured perhaps we could also implement Paypal as a third party payment processor."

Details:

-Payments: The 'givers' can send as low as a quarter and as high as $24 to support other individuals. The transactions occur every week on Thursday.
-Demographics: The current audience is open source programmers, many of whom use Paypal regularly.
-Software: Gittip's stack includes HTML, Python, JSON, SQL, , _

https://www.gittip.com/about/

[chadwhitacre]

IRC convo around the call w/ PayPal:

https://botbot.me/freenode/gittip/msg/2225890/

[abnor]

Still waiting for the emailed notes.

Viable only if we created a Paypal Business account for 'Gittip' as being the 'middle man' -> Paypal has complete line of sight into the flow of money. 2.9% charge + $.30

Express Checkout -> API version of money acceptance

Mass pay -> aggregate (250 different paypal accounts)
$1 per receiver, paid by sender

[abnor]

Hi Lyndy,

Great catching up with you and Chad today and learning about your business. Following up from our call today, I wanted to provide additional information about a couple PayPal solutions.

Express Checkout – front end payment acceptance engine. Consumer can pay with their PayPal account or a credit card. There is a transaction fee involved…2.9% + $0.30 for every transaction you receive.

https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/express-checkout

Mass Pay – back end payout solution. You can send payments to your client’s PayPal accounts. It will cost you $1 for every recipient you send to. No fee for your client to receive this payment.

https://www.x.com/developers/paypal/products/mass-pay

Thanks Lyndy. Let me know if you have any questions.

Regards,

Greg

[abnor]

Chad says no es viable since Paypal would want to be in charge of ALL the funds and would be too jealous to share them with anyone else. Plus the fees are rather high considering payouts happen weekly.

[skopp]

Wow. I've watched this whole thing since last year, and I must say... it's both sad and frankly expected - we're playing with the Wall Street faction; with Big Money. So, we're left with who? Wallet and Bitcoin?

I don't want to sound... ah, the hell with it. Let's be straight. I don't trust Google anymore. I get thousands of hits on a Youtube video I uploaded, for years, it says 'we are migrating over to a new data server' or something; and 'narrow down your criteria'. Google is not the same Google of just before Wave was killed.

[skopp]

What about Stripe though? I don't know much about them, but would like to.

[chadwhitacre]

What I heard from Greg at PayPal was:

• Gittip would have to be PayPal-only for this to work at all.
• Assuming Gittip went PayPal-only, we'd then have to go through an underwriting process in which 90% of applicants are rejected.

There's no way in hell PayPal would underwrite us. There's no way we're going to ditch Balanced, either. Balanced exists precisely to meet our type of use case.

@skopp Stripe is a fantastic product for credit card processing, but doesn't handle the other parts of running a marketplace robustly enough to fit our use-case. They actually asked us to leave.

[skopp]

@whit537 #63 (comment) Damn... I'll read up on Balanced, as I admittedly know nothing about them.

[chadwhitacre]

@skopp Balanced is a payments company, and we're close partners with them at this point (see, e.g.: balanced/balanced.github.com#18). You should definitely check them out:

https://www.balancedpayments.com/

[skopp]

Thanks, checking out right now

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 12:00 AM, Chad Whitacre [email protected]:

@skopp https://github.com/skopp Balanced is a payments company, and
we're close partners with them at this point (see, e.g.:
balanced/balanced.github.com#18balanced/balanced.github.com#18).
You should definitely check them out:

https://www.balancedpayments.com/

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/63#issuecomment-14871368
.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from yabdi via Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from Kate Turner in private email.

[chadwhitacre]

Greg also kept saying, when we were explaining Gittip to him, that Gittip is a direct competitor of PayPal.

[chadwhitacre]

Greg also used the phrase "line of sight" to explain why PayPal wants to own the whole system. It's no good for them for money to enter Gittip via PayPal and leave Gittip via another means.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from @henniemartens on Twitter.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 FD1380 (this fb post is a dupe?)

[chadwhitacre]

+1 https://gratipay.freshdesk.com/helpdesk/tickets/1929

[chadwhitacre]

Reopening in light of Balanced shutdown, and our consequent reliance on PayPal for payouts (#3567).

[chadwhitacre]

+1 #3574

[LiSongMWO]

+1 Many would-be supporters turn around when they realize they have to register to "the site of the week" and provide their CC number. Otherwise I would be all over this.

[mattbk]

+1s from comments at http://www.somersf1.co.uk/p/width640-height360-srcwww.html:

Can I contribute through PayPal? It is preferable to continued debit of my account.

---

I agree with Mack there, a paypal donate button would be preferable! (Although I will continue to support you through Gratipay)

[mattbk]

+1 from https://twitter.com/yusijs/status/779009959820455936.

[chadwhitacre]

+1 from Earl at the coffee shop! ☕️
+1 from my dad at some point!

[nobodxbodon]

Re-ticketed to gratipay/inside.gratipay.com#974 for further discussion and planning. After deciding on concrete implementation plan and dev work starts, this will be reopened for tracking purpose.

[mattbk]

+1 from FD 9412:

why don't you take payments by PayPal? Bottom line is this for me, I won't use it unless I can pay with PayPal, as I don't use a credit card on-line. And no, explaining the ease, security and benefits of using a credit card won't change that ;-). And I wonder if I'm alone.

[chadwhitacre]

Closing in light of our decision to shut down Gratipay.

Thank you all for a great run, and I'm sorry it didn't work out! 😞 💃