[ScottWhigham]

When I started http://www.learnitfirst.com/ originally, we only accepted PayPal. I did it this way because getting a merchant account seemed like a big deal+hassle (at the time). After we integrated PayPal, we added Google Checkout which was a collosal waste of time. We now accept credit cards directly.

I'd say that my customers 10:1 prefer to pay by credit card. If I didn't offer credit cards as an option, I figure I would have 20-40% fewer sales. That being said, get up and running first and foremost - that's what I think. You can always add credit cards. I think PayPal, for my customers, is an important option. Since it was the easiest of all to implement, I'd say start with it.

[ruslan]

Could you please drop a few words on how you fight credit card frauds and chargebacks ? This is the real and the only problem with CC processing we faced. We could not handle it, so our merchant account was blocked six months after we started due to high ratio of frauds. So now we accept through Paypal and Google Checkout only. Everyone who is going to start accepting credit cards directly must pay a thorough attention to CC fraud problem and there is no any ultimate solution for it.

[ScottWhigham]

Chargebacks through PayPal are almost non-existent. I think that in four years we've probably had a handful literally. Chargebacks through Google Checkout were so bad that we dropped them.

We went with Authorize.net as the gateway and another company for our merchant account. A lot of chargebacks can be handled by setting up your risk controls up-front correctly. Should the postal code be required to match? Should the card verification code be required? Those types of things have more to do with it than anything IMO.

[dxjones]

Thanks: PayPal first. Credit Cards second.

What made Google Checkout a collosal waste of time? Do customers choose not to use it? Or is it a hassle to deal with on your end?

[ScottWhigham]

We signed up for Google Checkout the first day we could. The integration was actually very easy but the problem was, for every five real transactions, we received one chargeback. That was incredibly high considering that, in 4+ years, we've only had a handful for PayPal.