Fiserv (First Data) - ICICI Merchant Services vs. PayPal Payments Pro

The arena of companies to choose from to process credit/debit card payments at this level is ridiculously small. I was told which one we would be working with, and am unaware how the others compare(especially on processing fees), but I can only assume that they would be better to work with than FirstData after the overly complicated process we have gone through over the last couple years when we were told it would easily take less than a year.

Incentivized

Paypal is great for personal payments as well as business payments for ecommerce of for paying monthly memberships. It is a user friendly software that needs little expertise to get used to. For larger payments, the fees become high therefore it is more suitable for payments of upto few hundred dollars.

• Provided our client with competitive rates
• Integration came with a sandbox environment, which was convenient
• Backend has a summary of all transactions and a report that can be exported

Incentivized

• You can Keep track of transactions and conform accounts daily
• Require users set strong passwords
• PayPal Payments also comes with an encryption feature that protects our customer’s and our data to the highest possible standard of security.
• Like its desktop version, PayPal Payments has a mobile application that is super easy to operate.
• PayPal Payments is extremely user-friendly and easy to use and comes up with a Great user interface.

Incentivized

• [In my experience,] merchants will just follow this scam service and they will say they provide a refund to the customer but actually they will not do anything just use your money by giving unnecessary excuses.

• Sometimes the UX flow would not deliver the customer back to our site, leaving orders in limbo "Pre-approved" status. The customer would call days later asking why we hadn't shipped it.
• The PayPal logo on the checkout page can be kind of large and obtrusive.
• They mention new features and programs on their login page, but it's hard to find any details on them deeper in the software.

Incentivized

Customer service representatives were unable to explain why customer in Australia were unable to make payments using our link. It turned out that customers in Australia must create an account. PayPal's user interface did not reveal this to our customers in Australia. There was plenty about this issue appearing in online forums and PayPal customer service couldn't explain this. This change in PayPal's usability happened between April and May of 2021 and was done without notice to vendors (like us).

Incentivized

We had previously used Elavon Merchant services. We found the provider to be more expensive and offer far less flexibility for our processing. Also, our processing was entirely manual and had to be done in the office.

Incentivized

For us, TransferWise was a very good option to be able to send and receive payments, it is a very reliable system and allowed our employees to receive payroll money safely, however, the reason we prefer PayPal Payments is because offers us a more instantaneous receipt of money, TransferWise made us wait several days for payments to be completed, we had to wait a long time for our employees to receive the money we sent them. PayPal Payments is very different, payments are completed instantly, the only delay is the one that is placed with the freezing of funds when sending money to a new employee.

Incentivized

• Sales have increased in the past year because I have a dedicated site to selling products that people used to have to come in person to order. First Data along with putting everything up on my website definitely makes it easy for me to automate things.

Incentivized

• In the past year we've lost a couple hundred dollars due to cancelled payment agreements
• Due to the large percentage who choose PayPal Payments, it's brought in thousands in sales that may have been abandoned otherwise
• Customers trust PayPal Payments and some feel more comfortable with it rather than putting in their credit card info. It's allowed purchasers who otherwise wouldn't have bought to purchase with the security of not having to enter sensitive payment info.

Incentivized