I use the European PayPal which I believe has different regulations (for the better) than the American one. I've never encountered a problem with getting funds in 3 years of heavy use.
We have had a few chargebacks which in some cases were decided in our favour. Afterwards I simply refunded the customer informing them they should have just asked for a refund :)
Any time I've had to contact their technical support via email, which is rare, it's been useless.
Their APIs are a mess. Documentation is all over the place and far too verbose. Many of the APIs overlap leading to further confusion. This isn't much of a problem if you use a cart or Rails Plugin but if you're coding your own stuff from scratch prepare to suffer. That said, once you understand it and get it working it's actually pretty good. You'll find there's little you can't do using PayPal.
The sandbox does a decent job of allowing you to run tests, but it does have some frustrations. You have to go through many steps to set things up. They have an IPN generator but it leaves out some important notification types for subscriptions. It's also totally separate from your real account, so even if things work in the sandbox, if a setting differs in your real account it will break in production (this has happened to me).
Their reports are okay but the website is pretty slow so getting at them is a pain. I hate going into the website because of the slow page loading.
If you do go ahead with PayPal I would recommend using it for a large volume of small one-off payments (means a lower risk from chargebacks). I use it for subscriptions but don't like the fact that if I have a problem with them I'll have to get those customers to sign up again. Always transfer money from it once it gets over $100 and create a separate bank account dedicated to PayPal. Regularly transfer the funds from it into your real account. Always have a backup payment source so you aren't losing sales if you encounter problems.
Comments
I use the European PayPal which I believe has different regulations (for the better) than the American one. I've never encountered a problem with getting funds in 3 years of heavy use.
We have had a few chargebacks which in some cases were decided in our favour. Afterwards I simply refunded the customer informing them they should have just asked for a refund :)
Any time I've had to contact their technical support via email, which is rare, it's been useless.
Their APIs are a mess. Documentation is all over the place and far too verbose. Many of the APIs overlap leading to further confusion. This isn't much of a problem if you use a cart or Rails Plugin but if you're coding your own stuff from scratch prepare to suffer. That said, once you understand it and get it working it's actually pretty good. You'll find there's little you can't do using PayPal.
The sandbox does a decent job of allowing you to run tests, but it does have some frustrations. You have to go through many steps to set things up. They have an IPN generator but it leaves out some important notification types for subscriptions. It's also totally separate from your real account, so even if things work in the sandbox, if a setting differs in your real account it will break in production (this has happened to me).
Their reports are okay but the website is pretty slow so getting at them is a pain. I hate going into the website because of the slow page loading.
If you do go ahead with PayPal I would recommend using it for a large volume of small one-off payments (means a lower risk from chargebacks). I use it for subscriptions but don't like the fact that if I have a problem with them I'll have to get those customers to sign up again. Always transfer money from it once it gets over $100 and create a separate bank account dedicated to PayPal. Regularly transfer the funds from it into your real account. Always have a backup payment source so you aren't losing sales if you encounter problems.