PayPal has become synonymous with online payments and this widely popular platform lets users make monetary transactions, completely doing away with the need for bank transfers and checks. This free payment processing service only requires the presence of a valid PayPal account on both the receiver and the sender’s end. The biggest upside to PayPal is its widely recognized platform and how easily it manages to integrate with other third-party platforms and carts.
In addition, there are some other disadvantages if we look into PayPal from ‘Merchant’ point of view, but as you are here, we expect you know some of them. Now, we will move on to top ten alternatives to PayPal, either as an online money transfer service or eCommerce payment method. Rather than merely mentioning names of these alternative services, we will go deep into advantages and disadvantages of each.
Pros
Cons
Commission
Sadly, Google Wallet and its features like money transfer, shopping in stores are available only in US. However, you’ll be able to use Google Wallet over 125 countries to purchase products from Google Play Store.
- Support over 200 countries and you can use Skrill in 40 currencies.
- Skrill Prepaid MasterCard lets you use money in Skrill account to purchase in real life
- Top-level Security
- Wide acceptance
- Low transaction fees
3. Payoneer
Commissions
Transfer fees of Payoneer depend upon the country you live and in which currency you process your transactions. In addition, there will be a slight charge when you use your Payoneer Credit Card via an ATM to use your funds.
Your business should be based in Canada, UK, Australia, United States, Ireland, Australia, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Austria, Italy and Switzerland to receive payments from Stripe.
5. Dwolla
Dwolla is yet another simple alternative for PayPal, as a payment service and a platform to send money to anyone on internet. If normal users can use Dwolla to make online payments and sending or receiving money, business owners can make use of Dwolla by using the platform to receive money from their customers. Using Dwolla, it is possible for you to send money to email addresses, LinkedIn connections, Twitter followers, phone numbers and businesses that accept Dwolla. Another feature of Dwolla is Dwolla MassPay, which lets you process thousands of payments at a time. Dwolla was notable for buying and selling of Bitcoins until it stopped dealing with Bitcoin exchanges in October 2013.
Where does Dwolla Work
Commission: 2Checkout charges 2.9%+$0.30 per transaction if you are from US and 5.5%+$0.45 otherwise
2Checkout is the best PayPal alternative for merchants. It is available in 196 countries through 8 payment methods, 26 currencies and 15 languages.
Implementing WePay in your site means setting up a way for customers to pay without leaving your site. WePay creates a virtual terminal in order to process payment. Since it is an API-based technology, you must have technical knowledge in order to implement WePay. Although the service keeps simplicity in all aspects, some features of WePay are very attractive. Just as some of above mentioned platforms, WePay, though it supports most of international cards, is available for customers from US and have a US SSN and billing address.
Commission: For each transaction made through Selz, it will charge a commission of 5%+$0.25.
Nevertheless, Selz is not available in countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Pakistan and Nigeria as well as the countries, which are not supported by PayPal.
Commission: Square charges 2.75% of total amount of money that is transferred. By the way, Square Reader is available for US and Canada only.
A war for your wallet has already been raged and Mobile payments are now catching up the pace since the introduction of Apple Pay a year ago. Quick to join it were the likes of Google, Facebook and Samsung to have a piece of this emerging trend in online payments. Apple Pay was introduced as a way to let you make payments with the comforts of your phone, instead of carrying a wad of cash or plastic cards along with you all the time. Through the use of an NFC terminal, supported at 220,000 retailers, you can instantly make payments through simply holding your thumb on the phone’s Touch ID sensor.
Commission: It is reported that Apple Pay nets about 0.15% of the transactions made through their platform.
It should be noted that we have added these online payment services in random order, as different people have different criteria while finding the ‘best’; some of you might be looking for lower commissions whereas some other prefer international availability. In other words, you can choose the most appropriate PayPal alternative from the list according to your requirement.