PayPal Zettle vs. Podium

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
PayPal Zettle
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
PayPal Zettle (formerly PayPal Here) is a POS and payment processing system that includes either a mobile card reader or a chip reader (hardware), and is powered by the mobile PayPal Here app. Admins can add up to 1,000 users per account, and the app also includes invoicing, reporting, and inventory management features. The pricing structure for payment processing is: 2.7% per US card swipe. 3.5% + $0.15 to key in cards. 2.9% + $0.30 to invoice. 1% for cross-border transfers.N/A
Podium
Score 5.6 out of 10
N/A
Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month 3 users
Pricing
PayPal ZettlePodium
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Podium Essentials
$249
per month 3 users
Podium Standard
$409
per month Unlimited users
Podium Professional
$599
per month Unlimited users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
PayPal ZettlePodium
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
PayPal ZettlePodium
Considered Both Products
PayPal Zettle
Chose PayPal Zettle
PayPal Zettle is comparable to these solutions in many ways. Toast and Clover were more expensive solutions that involved more time and hardware commitments than our operation needed. PayPal Zettle has very lite admin and reporting capabilities. It needs to improved these …
Chose PayPal Zettle
We love StoreLIVE, it is right up there with PayPal Zettle! Again, though, it is not as much of a well known name to the non-business owner. But WooCommerce is not at all even close to Paypal Zettle! It is complicated and exclusive to WooCommerce on the web and less in store.
Chose PayPal Zettle
The main selection criteria were ease of use and the presence of a plugin for WooCommerce. However, in practice it turned out that an important factor is also the availability of the product for purchase in a small batch and at an affordable price. I chose PayPal Zettle because …
Chose PayPal Zettle
Paypal's rates are slightly higher than my rates with Square or Stripe. While I can accept card payments with the Stripe app it isn't a true POS system.
Chose PayPal Zettle
It doesn't appear on the list but i used clip from mercadopago it is great but i trust more in paypal for their service and agility to solve issues. In clip i had a problem and it take weeks to solve it so i was a little disapointes for that and i decide to look for another …
Chose PayPal Zettle
They are both comparable and honestly could not say one is better than the other. I suggest looking at both options and picking what works best for you!
Chose PayPal Zettle
1) Square has a much more expensive startup cost in purchasing their hardware.
2) Square POS is not tailored for eCommerce
3) Square is not as easy to work with and has terrible customer service.
Chose PayPal Zettle
I actually use both but for the purchases where I'm on the go and at a concert, PayPal Zettle is better for me. Stripe works great for my courses online but again if I'm selling a product or service that is a one time deal and in the moment, it's so much easier for me to simply …
Chose PayPal Zettle
Square has good software and is relatively easy to use. The Square payment screen is more advanced than the basic model that PayPal uses. However, PayPal was a service that I already used-- and the company made it easy to integrate it into our business. Convenience and ease of …
Chose PayPal Zettle
It's been a while now since I've compared the two, but PayPay and Square were relatively similar for what we needed them for. I think the physical PayPal product at the time was a little bit more of what we needed, but I don't remember it being a very large margin between the …
Chose PayPal Zettle
Ultimately we selected PayPal Here because PayPal is such a trusted and well-known name, because of the easy-to-navigate user interface, because the card reader was inexpensive but performs well, and because the organization was already using PayPal to collect donations through …
Chose PayPal Zettle
I received my Square reader faster and it does its job well but, but the reader itself is small and very easy to lose. Unlike PayPal, I had to create a new account that would only be used for that single purpose. PayPal Here is an extension of PayPal so set-up was flawless and …
Chose PayPal Zettle
The PayPal Here app and the PayPal Here card reader are the only solutions we have ever used for manual processing of credit card payments or performing transactions where we physically accept payment via credit cards in person. We have never tried the Square credit card reader …
Chose PayPal Zettle
Square POS is substantially similar to PayPal Here in cost and function, but it doesn't allow us to collect the necessary data for campaign finance reporting and compliance. In past campaigns we would have to process a card donation and then still make donors fill out an …
Chose PayPal Zettle
Compared to Square, PayPal Here is less much less reliable. I have never struggled to take a payment with Square whether I was swiping the card or manually entering the card information. I feel like our customers are more accustomed to seeing the Square card reader as well …
Chose PayPal Zettle
I have used Square. It worked okay most of the time. The card reader went bad a couple times and happened pretty fast. It was not the best for how many cards we needed to swipe on a daily basis.
Chose PayPal Zettle
Paypal here is the mobile app that allows you to take credit cards on the spot. With the card reader you can get lower merchant service fees. I'd recommend picking up a card reader for your phone. It's definately worth it when you're billing thousands of dollars to a client and …
Chose PayPal Zettle
I find that PayPal Here works better as a self-employed or non-profit; it's simple, clean cut, and is a recognised brand throughout places like Etsy and eBay. PayPal Here feels like it's geared more towards the every person, especially artists and artisans. While I do use …
Podium
Chose Podium
In my opinion, Openphone is 10x better. Literally 1/5 the price.
Chose Podium
Just selected Podium as it had a partnership with our parent dealer company, a choice we do regret today
Chose Podium
We haven't tried or looked at others. However, we are now looking at 8X8.
Chose Podium
Reviewvio was terrible. Actually, it was always done and having "bugs" that keep things from working properly. And we have attempted to cancel the subscription and they are still charging our card.
Chose Podium
I can't recall the 'other' company we considered this year, but Podium won out because of the 'team chat' feature. It is our primary means of communicating with one another, both one-to-one and via teams/groups.
Chose Podium
Similar but Birdeye is less expensive.
Chose Podium
Podium had reached out to me years ago and stayed in touch. I felt they were the best and most professional company. Some others in our industry had tried competitors with mixed results. I did not even shop around when we went with Podium.
Chose Podium
We had the advantage of Podium integrating with our point of sale software already so that was a huge plus. We also felt that SMS gave people more freedom to communicate at their pace on their mobile device rather than being tied to a web browser or figuring out which tab they …
Chose Podium
I haven't looked into the competitive platforms yet but I will be doing that.
Chose Podium
used to use "Skipio" for texting and "social climb" for reviews, using all different systems for something one product can do, is just a pain! So it has been FANTASTIC!

We use Podium all day every day and we had to log in to multiple account systems to do all the things that …
Chose Podium
I have never heard of any of these other companies. I met Podium at the Las Vegas Furniture Market Trade Show and signed up right away because I could see the value in it. The sites we see most reviews on are Google, Yelp, and Trip Advisor. I didn't know there were more …
Chose Podium
We have evaluated multiple smaller companies that do not appear on TrustRadius including Swell, Yext, Solutions by Text, and ReviewInc. We currently utilize Podium for its integrations with our point of sale system and the fact that they have negotiated the cheapest rate on …
Chose Podium
The other software we have used which I will not name has an incredibly clunky UI that is straight out of the '90s. On top of that conversations are hardly organized making it difficult to manage multiple conversations. Podium is faster, more efficient, easier to learn, and …
Chose Podium
We used Reputation.com in the past. We were receiving tons of negative reviews from their email blasts.
Chose Podium
BirdEye was not easy to use and it did not give us the features we were looking for such as SMS and our employees would not use because it slowed them down with little ROI.
Chose Podium
To be completely candid, I have not used another review software other than Podium. I've worked here for just over 2 years, and our company had just started using Podium. Podium has been useful and successful for our team; therefore, there has not been any reason for me to …
Chose Podium
Their product is up to date and always improving. The other software we were using was more expensive and ancient in the software world.
Chose Podium
Very comfortable, however, where Podium offers a flat rate for all of its services, Reputation.com has an "al la carte" approach where you select the services you wish to use.

Examples: Auto-sending review request, responding to messages sent back by customers, in-depth …
Chose Podium
We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as …
Best Alternatives
PayPal ZettlePodium
Small Businesses
Square POS
Square POS
Score 10.0 out of 10
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Epicor Eagle
Epicor Eagle
Score 7.9 out of 10
Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
Enterprises

No answers on this topic

Yext
Yext
Score 8.9 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
PayPal ZettlePodium
Likelihood to Recommend
7.9
(0 ratings)
1.1
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(0 ratings)
9.9
(0 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Performance
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
1.4
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
10.0
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
PayPal ZettlePodium
Likelihood to Recommend
Despite the time that you have to wait to be able to receive the money for each transaction made through the PayPal Here POS system, I consider that it is a system that has a lot of potential and that, without a doubt, allows companies to obtain a lot of POS system cheaper, no need to pay for a bank POS system that is much more expensive and requires a more complex process to configure and register at the bank branch. I would definitely recommend PayPal Here for any small, medium or large company, it has excellent potential, the reading of the NFC chips is instantaneous and allows each credit or debit card to be recognized immediately and the transaction to be completed in a few seconds. It is a very advanced system, easy to use and very easy to configure, if you are looking for a system that is not so complicated to add a POS to your company, PayPal Here is the best option.
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Podium is well suited for several types of businesses. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, Podium would be a great way for you to ask that customers leave you a review online sharing their awesome experience. For medium to large businesses, Podium review invites can be automated through the company's customer management system, allowing the use of Podium to be simple and not timely, even with a large customer base. It may not be appropriate for a large company to manually send out individual review invites
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Pros
  • Our customers can check out no matter where we are.
  • It is incredibly easy to use. Training new retail employees and volunteers takes almost no time.
  • When we were shopping around for solutions, Paypal Here was very cost effective.
  • Implementation with our current systems went very smoothly. The Paypal support team was great.
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  • Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
  • Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
  • Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!
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Cons
  • The fees are a little bit high, although all POS and payment systems do charge fees.
  • Sometimes signing in and getting things to connect through our web store can be a challenge. It is great once it is set up but downloading plug ins and setting up initially is a challenge.
  • We have in-store pick up items that customers pay for at pick up and shipped items which customers pay for through the PayPal Zettle portal at checkout. This was very confusing to set up. I wish there was an easier way to mark items as payment upfront and payment later.
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  • Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.
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Likelihood to Renew
There are no monthly costs, the only expense is the card processing fee which is lower than nearly everyone else out there.
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Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!
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Usability
The overall usability was good for our organization. We rarely experienced much downtime or errors when using PayPal Zettle for business transactions. Some of our IPhone users had login and security issues a few times. That was the exception to the rule and we have been able to operate consistently for the majority of the time.
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While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.
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Reliability and Availability
Adding skus was down for 1hr one day, otherwise have never experienced an outage.
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We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use
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Performance
Everything is very fast. Adding products, selling products, processing cards, and receiving funds.
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It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool
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Support Rating
Support hasn't been needed in the 2 years of using PayPal but I have received calls from the company in the past asking about my experience with the device that was sent to me and they were pretty helpful with advice. Support is all over the internet if needed but for emergencies, so it is best to contact them during business hours.
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I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.
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Implementation Rating
It went very smoothly.
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We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.
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Alternatives Considered
Square has good software and is relatively easy to use. The Square payment screen is more advanced than the basic model that PayPal uses. However, PayPal was a service that I already used-- and the company made it easy to integrate it into our business. Convenience and ease of use were key.
Read full review
in my opinion, Podium is garbage. I would NOT have selected it except for the person we trusted to help us make a decision for a VoIP solution vehemently recommended it to us, telling us he used it himself for his e-bike shop, and was a 'Podium slut'. I would later learn that he received credits on his own Podium account for referring business to them.
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Scalability
Have not run into any limitations as of yet, with 500 SKUs entered and counting.
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Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools
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Return on Investment
  • One positive impact that PayPal here has had on our business is the ability to accept credit card payments which in itself increases our customer basis by 50%.
  • When PayPal fails, we have to pay higher fees to other processors, although I don't have an exact dollar impact.
  • When we struggle to take a payment using PayPal Here it makes our customers uneasy.
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  • Use of Podium has increased the star rating on various review sites for all of our dealerships using the product.
  • Use of Podium has increased the volume of new monthly positive reviews on various review sites for all of our dealerships.
  • While we can't measure the impact that positive reviews have on car shoppers, we know that it influences them and we believe that it is a factor for some people in making the decision to visit the dealership. Some customers have come in and said they read our reviews and wanted to give us a shot. Others have even asked for a specific salesperson who's name has come up in positive reviews, without having ever met or spoken with that salesperson.
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