I’ve used PayPal for the longest time and rarely had any problems with them, however, it turns out that PayPal are really expensive for international sales!
All providers charge around a few % on any transaction, but unique to PayPal they use their own exchange rates, not the standard ones! So in addition to their perfectly reasonable 3.5% standard fee there’s something approaching an extra 7% charge in either conversion direction because of their weird and terrible currency conversions and cross-border charges. They also only allow withdrawals in your local currency, so you are effectively forced into using their rates too, there’s no way around it and you can’t add international bank accounts. My general feeling is that PayPal haven’t really kept up with the way the world is changing.
Stripe are a huge payment processor used by millions of people, and charge a marginally less 2.9% fee. However stripe allow you to link multiple bank accounts, hold multiple currencies independently and move money around as and when it suits you. This saves me about 7%, which saves you 7%, which on an expensive pedal or attenuator is quite significant!
Whilst I swap over you will see two options at checkout. Use whichever you prefer. The PayPal one is tried and tested and will work fine. The Stripe (credit/debit card only for now) is new and whilst 100% safe and secure, and it has passed my testing, it might be a bit slower to process a transaction due to high security because I am a new customer for them.
Stripe also allows me to add Gpay, Apple pay, Przelwy24, Klarna and even bitcoin and more! Each of these things will get enabled over coming weeks and months as I register for their services.