Paypal Alternatives for Selling on eBay

Paypal Alternatives for eBay

Paypal is by far the number one used and preferred payment option on eBay. At one time Paypal and eBay were the same company. Paypal and eBay are linked in many ways which make selling on eBay easier such as automatically marking if an item has been paid on your eBay dashboard, allowing you to print shipping labels directly through eBay, cutting out the step of having to go plug tracking into eBay if you bought shipping elsewhere. Paypal is very streamlined with eBay and also buyers like it and trust it.

That said there are alternatives to Paypal. Below we'll list a number of alternatives to Paypal for selling on eBay. A few words of caution, Paypal is the most well put together payment platform out of these. Paypal has better customer service than most, minus a real merchant account. Paypal also is very streamlined with eBay so if you use other payment platforms you will have to manually enter your tracking, will have to buy your own shipping and won't get eBay or Paypal discounted shipping rates, and it's a bit trickiet to issue refunds. Below are your alternatives...

Paypal Alternatives for eBay Sellers

Skrill

Skrill in my opinion is a complete joke. It took over a month for me to get my account setup. Skrill is a company more geared towards people in the UK. They do not even have a US customer service line, if you call up you will be told  they can't help you and given some Skrill guy from the USA's cellphone number to call. The company seems like a joke and the difficulty I had just setting up the account totally turned me off from doing any business with them. Should I ever have an issue with the actual service good luck getting that resolved.

Propay

For eBay only allowing Skrill and Propay in addition to Paypal you'd think those companies would really put a strong effort into integrating with eBay for a seemless experience however Propay, though better than Skrill, does not really integrate that well into eBay.

Propay also does not allow all categories allowed on eBay. Pretty much any item you are allowed to sell on eBay is allowed to be sold through Paypal and accept Paypal payments. Not the case with Propay, they prohibit many legal and allowed eBay categories from using their service. Personally, I think if you want to be a payment processor for eBay you should allow all eBay categories, it only makes sense.

Merchant Account

There's a million different merchant accounts out there and resellers of merchant accounts. The benefit of merchant accounts is you can typically get much lower rates through a true merchant account than you can through third party aggregators like Propay, Skrill and Paypal.

The customer service is typically much better. You pay lower rates. You typically don't get holds or rolling reserves placed on your account, new sellers don't have money held for 21 days. It's a more secure payment processing relationship than Paypal and many others who will shut you down at the drop of a hat.

The downside to a merchant account, it's a little tricker to setup. You can no longer print shipping labels or isssue refunds directly through the eBay platform, and it's a little more complicated to keep track of who's paid and who hasn't, you have to buy your shipping through Stamps.com or some other service and then go back and plug tracking numbers into eBay which adds a minute or two to each transaction.



All payment processors have their ups and downs. If you get closed down by Paypal don't think you're done, there are alternatives out there. My personal opinion, if your account is closed by Paypal get a real merchant account but maybe open and keep a propay account for backup.