Paypal’s Slogan Gives Pause — and Merchants Lose
The paranoids among us are easily agitated. They don't go into basements during power outages. They don't abandon their cars and go in search of help on lonely highways (really, it's better to turn on the hazards and cower, preferably while clutching something with incredible stopping power). And they keep Caller ID operations in business.
And they probably need a bit more cajoling before giving up either personal or financial information online. Which is why a tagline from Paypal featured on some, but not all, Paypal-accepting sites is mystifying.
I'm one such paranoiac. I dislike ordering items online, as I feel (mostly irrationally) that every time I do so I compromise my bank card security a small bit. It's as if I'm rolling dice with my bank account, and sooner or later the house is going to win, and the house is based in Uzbekistan, or Nigeria, or somewhere else far beyond fund-recovery reach.
But the pursuit of pleasure can overcome paranoia, and my love of baseball outstripped my fear to a point where I was going to order MLB.com's online access to radio broadcasts of every game of the 2012 season.
And I was all set to give up my card information, until I hit the checkout page and saw my payment options: Credit/debit card, or Paypal. And next to the Paypal option was the seemingly innocuous statement "The safer, easier way to pay."
I don't have a Paypal account (and in this I'm not alone: according to Paypal parent company eBay's most recent financial statement, there are 106 million accounts registered throughout the 190 markets it serves globally). Meaning that I would have to go ahead with my planned use of my card, which had been suddenly branded a "less safe, more convoluted way to pay".
More convoluted I can deal with. Less safe? That hit the reptilian part of my brain, and hit it hard. And I did what any self-respecting reptile would do: I fled. (But first I puffed up very large so that any potential menace would see I was too large to swallow.) Transaction cancelled. By a paranoid lizard.
All right, so maybe I went a little light on my meds that day. Even so, I'm not sure why any Paypal-using merchant would put those words on its site – words which don't add any value to the customer, and could potentially cause a hiccup between potential transaction and consummation of the sale.
(It should be noted that Paypal bases its entire business model on security. And that companies such as Etsy.com probably wouldn't exist without it. But I still maintain that the current slogan is a lot more damaging than some of its earlier efforts such as "The world's most loved way to pay and get paid". But then, love ain't safe.)
There are some sites which offer the Paypal option that don't have this phrase next to the Paypal button. FTD.com, for example, doesn't – which is probably wise, as men who are purchasing flowers are probably already nurturing a sense of nameless dread of one sort or another.
I'd love to know whether anyone done an A/B test which evaluated cart abandonment rates, or at very least use of Paypal over other methods, when versions of the checkout page with and without these words have been served up. We paranoiacs may be few in number, but we spend. Unless we're spooked into not doing so.
