Affirm vs. PayPal Payments Pro

We use Affirm with a Woocommerce/Wordpress website and there is a plugin that integrates Affirm for us. We also use a payment method plugin that limits Affirms availability only to products that they support. Generally, we have had a good experience with integration and payments from Affirm to us are consistent and timely. People finance guitars, pedals, and amplifiers and it offers us a way to reach a customer base that may not otherwise purchase from us.

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.

• Customer support is always quick to respond.
• The dashboard is very easy to navigate and has useful information.

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

• Fees could be lower.
• Today there are a lot of other alternatives.
• Needed some coding help.

Incentivized

• 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

Easy to use, simple to integrate, especially if you are using Shopify Plus. Putting everything live and active was easy. We did have to do some simple HTML/CSS to make everything look the way that we wanted it to, but that was very easy and something that we did in house. If you can do some simple style work, you won't have any issues at all.

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

Shop Pay uses affirm but it's more integrated with Shopify. I recommend Shop Pay more if you are interested in using pay as you go. There's better integration at the checkout and they treat customers really well. I highly recommend moving over to Shop Pay if you already use Affirm.

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

• Well, since it cost us nothing to implement, and we did the customization to the look and felt in-house, we saw an immediate positive ROI. Orders starting happening within the first week of implementation and haven't stopped since. We don't get tons of orders from Affirm, but it is steady, and they are typically for several thousand dollars.

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