The biggest problem that’s surfaced with shifting the majority of orders to PayPal for payment is in tracking advertising. There’s been a significant drop-off of hits to the thank-you page after making payment — customers are leaving after PayPal’s receipt page without clicking the “return to site” button. Since the thank-you page is where the tracking code is for completed sales, it’s showing a sharp drop in conversion while the number of sales has actually increased recently. Now I know that if I develop my own ad tracking software, it’s going to need an API for other software (like a shopping cart / order fulfillment system) to send information about completed sales.
August 31st, 2007
Can’t you set your own thank-you page? I thought I did that once. I remember PayPal was very strict about what wording had to be on the page — things like “transaction complete” and “paypal has emailed you a receipt.”
September 20th, 2007
You can set Paypal to force a redirect to your thank you page. It’ll still show the standard Paypal receipt page, but redirect after a few seconds.