So long, farewell

auf wiedersehen goodbye PayPal.

There's a new kid in town - in fact there's a couple of new kids in town but I'm particularly excited about.

One of the worst things about doing any ecommerce website is payment processor integration. My first ecommerce site (www.charles-rennie-mackintosh-font.co.uk) back the late 90's used PayPal because credit card processing back then was real expensive. It still is to a certain degree, particularly for small merchants.

Historically, taking payments with PayPal has been a nightmare, not to mention the ocassional ring-fencing of funds. The issue with PayPal is that they are not a bank and so aren't governed by the Banking Conduct of Business Sourcebook ( I preferred Banking Code but whatevs') so when things went wrong, trying to get anwers was like getting blood from a stone.

I was real jealous of my US colleagues when Stripe made an appearance. Simple payments, straight to your bank account with minimal fuss. The drawback being that it was only available in the US (at the moment).

You can imagine my excitement to find that there was a UK solution in the form of GoCardless. 

GoCardless charge 1% per transaction (compared to PayPal's 3.4% + 20p if you do less than £1500 per month). An average transaction on CRM is circa £25. So we lose more than £1 per transaction. With GoCardless, we'd lose 40p per transaction and it's capped up to a maximum of £2 anyway.

Thankfully, the guys @cartthrob sent me an email asking if we wanted to test the GoCardless plugin - it rocks. Nice and simple. 

The plan is to hit it some more before we deploy into live but we're looking forward to using it and saying goodbye to that PayPal pain.