Getting Paid On The Web

The Internet provides hundreds of ways to connect people all over the world. An important element in the global marketplace is safe, inexpensive ways to transfer money from one person to another. For people in the “civilized” world, Paypal has become the de facto standard. With no setup fees, relatively low charges and a workable mechanism for handling disputes, Paypal is one of the quickest and easiest ways to set up a simple and secure payment system on a website.

For South Africans, however, Paypal is a bit of a joke. Paypal allows us to open an account and make payments to others. However, South Africans are unable to receive payments to their Paypal account – without some black hat jiggery-pokery, that is.

There are, fortunately, some good alternatives to Paypal. If you’re in South Africa, and want to receive payments from South Africans, PayFast is the local Paypal equivalent. It was started by Andy Higgins, who created BidOrBuy. It’s easy to set up and inexpensive. There are no monthly service charges; PayFast takes a percentage of each transaction.

Until recently, PayFast only worked with electronic transfers between banks, but they recently started processing credit cards as well.

Unfortunately they don’t accept payments from Paypal.

If you want people from the rest of the world to be able to pay you using Paypal, there are three alternatives that I know about: Clickbank, 2Checkout and Plimus.

Clickbank is brilliant. They have been going for over 10 years now. A $49 setup fee is charged. You can sell up to 500 products with one account – but you only have one affiliate page for all 500 accounts. Very easy to use. Payments are by cheque, every 2 weeks.

Clickbank insists on approving your first sales page – after that, you can do whatever you like (within their terms of service, of course.) They have some quirky features – for instance, the compulsory money-back guarantee period is 8 weeks. That’s 56 days. Not 60 days, 56 days.

Clickbank doesn’t allow direct access to your customer list.

2Checkout is a strange animal. They have some excellent ideas, like their integration with the Payoneer debit card. This allows people in other countries, South Africa for instance, to draw cash from a local ATM using a card. But 2Checkout has some dumb aspects, as well.

They charge a $50 or so setup fee for an account. You can only use an account with one domain name; an additional account is $20. Their back-end system and help system is a complete joke – ease of use was apparently not a consideration.

And on the other hand, there’s Plimus. These guys seem to have put in everything one could wish for in a payment processor, and then some. There is no setup fee. You can set up payment pages on any domain you choose. The back-end is complex, but doesn’t take long to understand.

Their system lets your customers download digital products (up to 500MB) from their servers. You can change the look and feel of their payment page to match your sales page. Their affiliate program lets you set affiliate commissions independently for each affiliate, if you want. You can approve affiliates manually, if you like.

There is no pre-approval process for your sales pages (of course there is a list of products you can’t sell). The system incorporates a limited autoresponder to send newsletters to your customers.

There are some other nifty features: you can upsell a physical CD backup version of your product; Plimus will warehouse and ship physical products for you.

PayFast
Plimus
2Checkout
Clickbank

Interesting reading:
http://imod.co.za/2008/02/13/i-called-paypalcom-today-from-south-africa-and-asked-wasssup/