[ryanmercer]

>They nearly charge 5% of the transaction on an average.

It's great for small business owners that aren't doing a lot of volume, especially if you aren't running a cart system and just want to sell things on a basic website, sell stuff like art, sell stuff in person, buy stuff from people on reddit, ebay etc.

If you go a more traditional route you are going to have to have to apply to a credit card merchant, cough up an up-front fee that's probably 100$ or more, an annual fee, a per transaction set rate and then pay 2-5% of each transaction, end up getting slammed with 25-75$ (or more) chargeback fee and risk your rates going up if someone does a chargeback (instead of PayPal's dispute process) etc.

PayPal friends & family gets used like crazy in my office, we're far removed from Silicon Valley and I don't think anyone has ever even heard of Venmo here. We use it all the time to pay each other for lunch runs.