[Board] Fwd: On Stripe and PayPal

[Jeff McKenna]

Forwarding a nice report from the QGIS PSC on donation/payment options.


-------- Forwarded Message --------

Dear PSC,

Now that Stripe is in service already for a couple of weeks I would like 
to let you know about the difference between PayPal and Stripe.

First - again a big thanks to all who helped integrating Stripe (or 
recommending it in the first place) - thanks Richard, Tim, Jürgen and 
Strk (who also recommended using Stripe). Also, thanks for implementing 
the receipts by e-mail and integration with our donors list, Richard!

With respect to payment fees, Stripe is way better. They keep on average 
<= 3.5 % of the payments, all the way until it ends up in our bank 
account. With PayPal, this can be up to 10% of payment fees. Also, for 
some reasons, PayPal users sometimes prefer to change currency from Euro 
to their own currency, which would be yet another unnecessary currency 
conversion with fees involved.

I still have to get used to the Stripe portal, but altogether I am 
pretty happy with Stripe. It is also easy to manually create an invoice 
for sponsorships, should a sponsor from outside Europe prefer to pay 
with credit card.

The only slight drawback with the current stripe integration is that we 
don't have a free form to enter any amount, the user wants - or maybe 
better - any amount larger than 10 €. While this is, at one hand, a good 
thing (minimum amount is at 10 € and people are more unlikely to use 
such an amount for illegal testing of stolen credit cards), some people 
might want to donate a larger (or in between amount).

The other very minor usability issue I can see with the Stripe payment 
form inside 
https://www.qgis.org/en/site/getinvolved/donations.html#qgis-donations 
is that there is a frame (with rounded corners) around "Name", "E-Mail" 
and the amount combobox,but no frame around the credit card fields (Card 
number, expiry date and CVC). I think it would be nicer if those three 
credit card widgets would also have the same frame like the other fields.

What do people think about removing PayPal from our donations options 
(not closing the account, but just remove it from the options)? Would 
people miss it, or would we miss out on donations? We can also postpone 
this decision for a couple months, but more incentive for people to use 
Stripe instead of PayPal would be nice.

We already have this text: "You can use Paypal to donate using your own 
credit card (but we prefer to use Stripe for that). The payment is 
processed by PayPal but you don't need to have a PayPal account or 
sign-up for one if you are paying by credit card.", but still quite a 
few donors use PayPal, probably because it is more well-known than 
Stripe or more convenient for them to use.

Thoughts about Stripe/PayPal?

Thanks and greetings,
Andreas

--
Andreas Neumann
QGIS.ORG <http://QGIS.ORG> board member (treasurer)