No more PayPal support?

[Pete3805]

So I just saw a pop up saying PayPal will automatically be removed from October this year??? Why? Most of our customer use PayPal, if it isn’t going to be a payment option I may have to move our website elsewhere 

[Laurie_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Pete3805,

I'd be happy to provide some further context around this change from our Square Online team.

Two of our biggest priorities for Square Online are making its experiences more integrated with the rest of Square, and improving reliability and speed. We are rolling out a series of changes to the product this year that will help us make significant improvements for both of these. You can learn more about this broader effort here.

Unfortunately, these improvements aren’t compatible with our integration with PayPal. We know that most sellers using Square Online today don’t accept PayPal, and we believe most buyers visiting Square Online sites are comfortable using one of our other convenient payment methods, like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Afterpay.

Given this, we are choosing to invest in making our ordering experiences even more reliable and remarkable rather than build a new PayPal integration at this time.

I hope this helps clarify the details around this change, but please let me know if you have any additional feedback or further questions I can assist with.

[Laurie_ · Accepted solution]

Hi @Pete3805,

I'd be happy to provide some further context around this change from our Square Online team.

Two of our biggest priorities for Square Online are making its experiences more integrated with the rest of Square, and improving reliability and speed. We are rolling out a series of changes to the product this year that will help us make significant improvements for both of these. You can learn more about this broader effort here.

Unfortunately, these improvements aren’t compatible with our integration with PayPal. We know that most sellers using Square Online today don’t accept PayPal, and we believe most buyers visiting Square Online sites are comfortable using one of our other convenient payment methods, like Apple Pay, Google Pay and Afterpay.

Given this, we are choosing to invest in making our ordering experiences even more reliable and remarkable rather than build a new PayPal integration at this time.

I hope this helps clarify the details around this change, but please let me know if you have any additional feedback or further questions I can assist with.

[Pete3805]

Thanks for the response. 

as a large portion of my business is via PayPal I guess this gives me no other choice but to move my website elsewhere.

Why square wouldn’t want to incorporate PayPal support just shows me they do not have their customers interests in mind.

[BH971]

Definitely agreed. This page also seemed to have a lot of discussion which has been deleted, which is incredibly disappointing. I can find no other threads about it either (they DID exist, they have been removed).

PayPal was a no brainer. Australians love it. I mean for goodness sake, at least give merchants the opportunity to still use it with a fee or something?

I also don't for ONE moment believe the "improving reliability and speed". Square-built websites have some of the WORST benchmarking scores when it comes to speed and reliability (mostly due to ridiculous over-use of third party code and scripts - Square has been a nightmare to work with as a professional developer myself). Removing PayPal will not make the day-to-day browsing of a website faster - this is purely a change made because PayPal was obviously too expensive or are somehow competing with Square.

In my professional work, I have moved a few businesses to Square due to their ease of use as an all-in-one solution. But almost at EVERY turn there are issues. This should be expected, but this latest PayPal removal is seriously bad.

Overhauling existing systems and moving them to another platform is hundreds of man hours of work. Square enticed me with their options, including PayPal and Afterpay. Then they just feel like they can take it away under the guise of "performance"? Ridiculous. What's next? "We are excited to announce that we are removing Afterpay after noticing the loading times were a few seconds too long!"

Please. If the change is being made for financial reasons (this is obviously the reason):

1) Be upfront about it.

2) Offer us merchants the ability to agree to a fee (say 1% or whatever) to use PayPal. This is VASTLY preferable than completely LOSING a sale because a customer wanted to use PayPal.

[TheGamingArena]

I agree with almost every part of this. If I knew then what I knew now, I would never have picked square and square online.

[BH971]

The thing is, Square is slowly becoming a very good system, one in which I am happy to recommend to businesses and be their biggest advocate. I want Square to be better than the rest. Even just a few years ago, you could only apply one category to a product, and category nesting wasn't possible. Features keep being added, bugs keep being fixed. Their API for developers is actually incredibly robust with good documentation, and their Discord is active and super helpful. BUT then they take two steps backwards with changes like this which are utterly anti-consumer.

Other examples like being able to search transactions via items is possible on the app and on the computer, but NOT on the dedicated Square Register hardware. Like why? It feels like at many junctures , Square's inter-team communication is extremely lacking, resulting in decisions and product solutions which make no sense to the people ACTUALLY using their systems and cause frustration and confusion.

When you promote your services, offering PayPal as an eCommerce option not even 3-6 months ago (Internet Archive is down at the moment, but it'd be easy to prove), pulling the support for it so quickly seems really gross. When a business changes to a new platform, you want to use it for 5+ years before advertised features are removed or changed. Removing a feature while having advertised it a short while prior feels like a real bait-and-switch.

It may well be that the majority do not care that PayPal is removed (although I never recall Square polling me or any business I have worked with for their opinion), but this is really quite simple. In Australia, PayPal is still huge. We WILL lose customers through this change, and Square themselves will lose clients. 

The functionality for PayPal payments is already present. It works, and it works well. Simply keep the option to turn it on or off for your website, but just introduce a fee for those who keep wanting to use it.

This is an utterly baffling position. Perhaps Square are in a legal battle with PayPal or something? That would really be the only answer which would make such a nuclear option make sense.

Please forward this to your technical teams, @Laurie_. Heck, I'd even be willing to be charged a fee to allow custom third-party integrations. It'd be amazing say for a fee of 1-2% I could develop my own PayPal integration if Square is unable to offer it. The main point is that REMOVING working features is such a step backward. Square's reputation for being fiddly and difficult is slowly going away, but then changes like this just reverse any positive changes in public opinion.

[mhweft]

HI @BH971, @TheGamingArena 

Mine was one of the comments that got removed.  I found the original small notice on our payments page and asked what was happening.  After the above response was put on, I reacted (poorly but with style) stating that it had nothing to do with performance, more it was about ensuring that square grabbed a part of every transaction.  I was told that negative comments violated this forum and my post was removed and I was warned not to continue.

The reality is that Australians (and many others) love paypal because of the protection and ability to get a refund on a bad transaction.  Many of our customers have indicated they never shop online if a paypal payment isn't offered.  As online is a significant part of our business and paypal is about 50% of that.  We have no alternative - gone as soon as we finish the redesign.

My timer is on for all these comments to be deleted.

[vvebsta]

What alternatives are you all considering? I was looking into Paypal Braintree. Any other good ones?

[TheGamingArena]

to avoid potentially breaking any community rules here I won't say specific alternative POS and eCommerce solutions I am looking at.

[TheGamingArena]

I am also dissapointed in this response. We have probably 30% of our sales use paypal. I am not 100% sure how many sales we will lose as a result of this change, but it is not 0.

[Laurie_ · Accepted solution]

@Pete3805 @BH971 @TheGamingArena @mhweft @vvebsta 

Hi all,

I want to start by saying that we value the time and effort you put into sharing your thoughts and helping one another here on the platform—it's what the Community is all about. We welcome your opinions and feedback; however, when discussions veer away from productive dialogue, we may need to step in and remove certain posts. If that happens, we’ll always reach out to you directly to explain why. All we ask is that everyone keeps in mind how their words might affect others. I've provided a link to our Community Code of Conduct for your reference.

The details I can share about this decision are outlined in the Best Answer in this thread, and Square has also sent email updates to impacted Sellers explaining the changes.

I’ll continue to ensure the feedback shared here reaches the teams involved.

While I understand this isn’t the news you were hoping for, unfortunately, there won’t be an option to continue accepting PayPal on Square Online after the planned date.

I understand this might be frustrating, but my role here is to help clarify Square’s position on this change and help manage expectations as we move forward.

To help other Sellers easily find this discussion, I’ve moved this thread to the Square Online Discussion board.

[SmallMouth]

After moving from Shopify online to SquareUp online only a handful of months ago due to great processing fees, and the acceptance of AfterPay and PayPal, we are quite upset that we have to spend countless more hours going elsewhere and redesigning a website and adding all my items back in because of this change. My boss has now asked me to look into alternatives not just for our website, but also our business's in-store POS that is pulling in millions per year in revenue that square takes a % fee of. Great way to make money by removing a feature that in Australia is basically a requirement for online stores for customers to feel safe and protected.

[LTA]

Absolutely not happy that PayPal is no longer an option. We only went with a Square Website because it had PayPal and by the time we were ready to go live it was gone, but didn't realise. We are currently exploring alternatives such as Square's namesake due to it offering PayPal and us having no online sales since going live with our website with Square which we will have to attest to PayPal no longer being option. Square has really hurt its customers being shop owners to have made and implemented such a decision before having an alternative that is better.

(If you remove my comment it means you really do not want others to know the truth and will further fortify our decision to leave, and request a full refund as it was not made clear to us before going live under Australian Consumer Law).