The advantage of PayPal for the Service Data By Email product is that their charges on smaller transactions are reasonable. On a £1.99 order they charge me about 27p. They also have a nice shopping cart facility which allows you to add several items and pay in one go at the end.
PayPal now allow you to send money even of you don't have a PayPal account. You just need a credit/debit card. Once you have completed the payment you can store the details to set up a PayPal account if you wish, but it's not compulsory.
All the other online payment options I have looked at have higher charges and/or do not have the shopping cart facility. However I am continuing to look into other options.
I realise that some people do not want to use PayPal for various reasons, although as detailed above they are the best option for me. I am currently investigating NoChex whose charges are also reasonable.
It is likely that the service will be changed to a system that provides a download link rather than email delivery before the end of 2006. At this stage I should be able to offer NoChex payments and will look into other options. This will also solve the problems of emails not always being received when sent to certain domains (especially HotMail and AOL).
Comments and suggestions on payment methods are always welcomed (email address is below). Please remember however that I am selling low value products in low quantities, so things like WorldPay or merchant accounts are not viable. Also, shareware registration services have per-item charges that are unsuitable for small amounts like £1.99.
When PayPal processes a payment they automatically send an email with the details. On the email server these are copied to a second email account.
This account is checked every five minutes by a custom piece of software (written by me using VisualBasic 6 with some 3rd party POP3 and SMTP components) running on a file server on our ADSL line. This reads and processes the email, then carries out a number of security and integrity checks to make sure it is genuine. It then emails the required data files automatically, logs what it has done, and sends me an email of the log. It also stores logs in a form that makes it easy for me to create a monthly report for my accounts.
Simply because the software that processes the orders (see above) is running on a server in our home on our ADSL line. It is possible that the ADSL line could go down, we could suffer a power failure (longer than the UPS can keep the systems up) or the server could crash or suffer a hardware failure etc. It is also possible that PayPal could fail to send the email when the payment is processed (this happens occasionally), or our hosting/email provider could have a temporary problem. Also email may take some time to get through the servers at your ISP.
So I obviously cannot guarantee the delivery. However I can state that from information available to me, approximately 99% of orders are sent out by my system on time (though I do not know whether they are received within this timeframe).
If you have not received your data two hours after you have received the payment confirmation email from PayPal, please contact me. I will then send your data manually, generally within 24 hours. Before contacting me please check the status page of this website for any status messages that could explain the delays.
I plan to change over to a download link system using a shopping cart system before the end of 2006. This would give yo a link to immediately download your data as soon as you have completed payment. This will reduce the reliance on external systems and should also be easier and more convenient for customers. This should also allow me to offer other payment methods such as Nochex.
Please check my main UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration website or ask in my UK Vintage Radio Discussion Forum.
Please check the relevant pages on this website first. If you cannot find the answer please email me.
paul
(at) service-data.com