It’s almost 2018, and the days of instantly sending and receiving money are here – and here to stay.
PayPal is still using the “eCheck” as the only way to pay with your PayPal account, if you don’t have enough funds and no card is added in your PayPal Account.
Some might see this as an edge case – but for the past 7 years, we’ve seen this happen way too often to be an edge case.
But, you may ask – why is an eCheck so horrible?
You still get paid, right? Yes – but we’ve finally reached our frustration limit with the downsides of accepting eChecks, and we believe these downsides are very legitimate:
When the vendor is paid with an eCheck, it takes 5-7 days (normally) for that eCheck to clear. Within that time, it’s extremely hard for the customer to cancel that eCheck if they need to – and impossible to track the status of it. So, both us and our client have no other choice but to wait while PayPal takes 5-7 days, and sometimes more – to pull funds from the user’s bank account and send it to our PayPal. All while we could have instantly received the funds via alternative payment gateways.
Secondly, (and most importantly), this begins to create several complicated scenarios when it comes to recurring billing. Like most medium-large businesses, we use an automated billing system to manage client accounts, generate invoices and automatically capture charges. In fact, we have our own PayPal payment gateway to allow us to automatically bill our users without them having to login and pay with PayPal each month. So – when an invoice is captured, and the client either doesn’t have enough funds in their account – or doesn’t have a backup card added to their PayPal account, PayPal generates an Echeck – and we receive an email letting us know we “might” receive the funds in 5-7 days.
In our opinion, eCheck has long outlived its usefulness.
We believe PayPal can do a far better job in both recording and tracking eCheck payments in their system, as well as in the length of time the eCheck is “pending”.
This is why we’ve decided to no longer accept eCheck payments (via a setting in our PayPal account) – to make life easier for our customers, admin/billing team – and accounting team.
As a viable alternative, we recommend using a PayPal account with a positive balanace or a backup credit card added, or our Bitcoin payment gateway.
We'll look into introducing new payment gateways in 2018.
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