Hi Sally
Wearing my non-English Heritage hats. I'm membership secretary of the Friends of St Helena and sales manager for the trading company of the Tolkien Society. Both of these use PayPal the first for membership (amounts from £8-£30) and the second for sales of goods (£5-£100). I've found that it works well in both cases. The shopping cart function is easy to set up and provided chunck of HTML that can easily be pasted into any web site.
I've heard some people say that they have had difficulty getting money out of PayPal and into their bank account. I've not had that problem, but I think that this is because we were careful to set up the PayPal accounts as proper business accounts in the first place. You do need to have a current account with the same name that you use to set up the PayPal account (e.g. in our case "Tolkien Society Trading Ltd") and you do need to be able to set up a direct debit instruction in favour of PayPal on that bank account. I would strongly recommend getting your paypal account to the stage where it has ticks next to "you can withdraw funds" before you using it to take payments.
NB the PayPal shopping cart buttons will allow people without a PayPal account to pay by credit or debit card, but if they do have a PayPal account associated with the card they try to use it will force them to pay via their PayPal account.
It costs about 3.4% of the transaction if you don't pay any monthly fees (it varies a bit depending on the country of residence of the customer). You can get lower percentages from other card acquirers but in my experience they all come with minimum monthly fees which can be quite steep (Barclaycard used to charge the Tolkien Society a minimum fee of £490 a year). One thing to be aware of is that PayPal charges the same for credit and debit card transactions whereas the banks will charge a fixed fee for debit cards and a percentage fro credit cards, this makes PayPal cheaper for small value (under £10) debit card payments.
Trevor Reynolds
Collections Registrar, English Heritage
tel: +44 (0) 1904 601905. 37 Tanner Row, York, YO1 6WP
-----Original Message-----
From: Museums Computer Group [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Sally Lewis
Sent: 29 January 2013 11:25
To: REYNOLDS, Trevor
Subject: Use of Paypal to collect memberships online
We are a museum and gallery membership organisation looking to improve the methods of payment for our members.There have been previous discussions on the use of Paypal- for and against for purchasing but could'nt find any recent discussion relating to use for this purpose. Does anyone have any experience of collecting relatively small subs (£15-70) in this way please?
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