PayPal.ME – Friend or Foe?

PayPal.ME was just released onto the internet and (unsuspecting) public September 1st.

Even over the holiday weekend I saw several emails encouraging me to go sign-up for it – lickety-split!

To me the service really seems aimed more at the “friends and family” market than the business market.

First Things First – Go SECURE your PayPal.ME name
CLICK HERE RIGHT NOW – I’m NOT JOKING!

Even if you don’t plan to use PayPal.ME you STILL need to CLAIM YOUR NAME to protect yourself, your contacts & clients from anyone else who may claim your name (business name) associate your photo or logo (easily pulled from social media profiles) and use them in order to collect funds by impersonating you.

The screens and interface have a very “social profile” feel and it seems like it’d be a great way to “go Dutch” (split/share) on a restaurant bill or pay back your room mate the $20 she loaned you last “cheese week” when you were tapped out!

It’ll also make it super easy to exchange quick small’ish amounts of money, without having to login to your PayPal account to “request money”. So if you throw a charge on your card for tickets to see a show while you’re at a conference in Vegas (I don’t think many of their shows are small’ish money at all but you get the point), PayPal.ME may be a handy way for a friend or business associate to pay you back for theirs.

But having said all that and after taking a closer (slightly horrified) look, I’m absolutely convinced that EVERYONE should SIGN-UP ASAP – if only to protect your name (and/or your brand) from unscrupulous ne’re do wells, who will inevitably be jumping all over this.

Will PayPal.ME Make It Easy To Ask For Money?

It really does appear this particular service is aimed at the “non-commercial” peer to peer payments market. It takes far fewer steps to collect or request payment and the URL is so easy to remember, even a politician would be able to recall it! 🙂

At first glance, it does seem like a great way to request or collect payments quickly and easily without requiring you login to your PayPal account to create a new payment button or embark on a search worthy of Lewis & Clark to find the code for an existing button.

The PayPal system automatically connects your PayPal.ME link with the name associated with your PayPal account and lets you personalize your “payment page” with a photo or logo and a short blurb about you/your business.

You can even create a dynamic link on the fly by adding an amount to the end:
PayPal.ME/DebraLloyd/7 ($7 US Dollars) or PayPal.ME/DebraLloyd/97 ($97 US Dollars)

So this all looks and sounds really handy, but I’m not so enamored of it for businesses and here’s why…

DANGER Will Robinson…you may lose way more than you gain!

While I can see some benefits for collecting cash from friends and family, I see quite a few limitations if you try to apply this to business:

1. It’s one size fit’s all – (but of course, in reality, it doesn’t). You can’t create specific payment pages for specific purposes. So if you’re using one PayPal account for multiple businesses understand, you’re only allowed one PayPal.ME page per PayPal account
2. The page is quite generic so you’ll need to address that in your personalization
3. It leaves no room for separation of multiple streams of income (separate accounts are best but I know the cost keeps some from following that practice)
4. There’s no way to send or redirect people to a custom thank you page
5. There’s no way to ask them to opt-in to your list
6. You can’t track anything about the payment – so if you use it in multiple places or for multiple income streams you’ll have no idea what they paid you for and no idea which link they followed to make payment from

Conclusion

PayPal.ME will be a great way to “ask” for money from your room mate for his share of a pizza or to ask your parents to “front you” the price of said pizza. For a lot of close-social-circle, small money payments, it’ll be much faster and easier, so for sure it will make sense for those types of transactions.

For business though, call me cynical, I’m really concerned about the potential for fraud and it resulting in a huge number of “impersonators” scalping money from the “technically naive”, with an equal amount of customer service backlash and aggravation if you don’t secure your name ASAP.

As you can see I’ve already secured my name and associated it in the “bio” with two of my online businesses. I certainly don’t intend to use PayPal.ME as it stands today, as a means to collect payments for products or services though.

I don’t at this point, envision myself using it at much all but I’ve secured my name, simply to make it more difficult for anyone else to abuse it.

What SHOULD You Use Instead?

The thing is in business, we all need to collect money but sometimes it’s a bit of a pain to stop and drop whatever it is you’re doing, to go make a new invoice, buy button or payment page especially for a one off payment.

The whole thing did set me off in search of a better solution though, one that would be secure for anyone using it but also give me all the tracking capability I want and need, especially from a payment page.

LeadPages As A Payment Page

I have to admit, I was a LeadPages hold-out for quite some time, way longer than I should have been in fact.

Mostly I just didn’t want to incur, yet another, monthly subscription fee and I know enough HTML to be able to create a pretty decent landing page that would emulate at the look of their awesome landing pages – just not one with all the tracking and reporting bells and whistles behind it.

So a couple of months ago though, I reached the point where I realized (finally admitted) I was losing way more than the cost of a subscription in the time it took me to create and set up a landing page, to say nothing of trying to split test everything afterwards.

I’ve got a few other things to run off and take care of right now, but I’ll update this post with a payment page LeadPages example (I’m still mulling over the best template to start because they have so many great choices) within a few days so be sure to bookmark this post or use the “Rocket Opt-In form” (in the right sidebar or scroll down on mobile) to be sure you don’t miss a thing – ever (I’ll even send you a free Content Quality Checklist just to welcome you to the fold).

Chat again soon.
Cheers,