We’re proud to announce Pool Dues is now a certified PayPal Partner! What’s that mean for our clients? Here’s the short list of benefits…
- Reduced transaction fees on credit card payments. 2.5% (or lower) instead of your current rate of 3.5%. Rates vary by payment source, but for clients that have already upgraded we have seen rates as low as 2.1%.
- Buyers can save their payment method, making it super fast to check out. Card data is still stored with PayPal (not your website), so it is both convenient and safe.
- Apple Pay will be a new option at checkout. Similar to Venmo, the money will still end up in your PayPal account. Apple Pay just becomes another quick way for buyers to pay.
- No more “holds” for receiving a lot of revenue in a short span (automatic holds occasionally occurred when our clients stopped receiving revenue in the off-season, then took a lot in during their invoice period).
- For clubs that do installment or automatic annual re-billing, you will have more control over collecting on missed payments.
- Cards saved on file will be updated automatically if expired or stolen, so if they are used with an automatic re-billing plan the chance of a missed payment is reduced.
- Dedicated account managers at PayPal to work with our clients. We’ve collectively attained VIP status!
- More debugging options (on our end) for cases where a buyer might have trouble paying.
- Clearer feedback to the buyer if they have trouble ordering (for example, if their credit card were maxed out we can alert them why the order failed).
- The same familiar interface for purchasing (so no shocking changes to your buyers).
- Money received still goes directly into your PayPal account. Nothing even remotely changes in this regard.
- It’s a FREE upgrade that saves your club a lot of money. It is also essential to use PayPal’s latest payment processing API’s. We all know tech changes, so we need to stay ahead of the curve to change with it.
Upgrading takes about 30 seconds
To upgrade click the obnoxiously big banner on the Board Member Dashboard. You will need to log into your Paypal account to approve re-connecting your website to PayPal and letting Pool Dues help process your payments.
Once finished you will see something similar to the image below. Click Return to PoolDues, LLC (where the orange arrow is pointing). That will send you back to the Board Member Dashboard on your website, and us here at PoolDues will get notified you’re ready for us to finish the upgrade. That’s it.
Technical boredom, go!… Some of you reading that image might wonder, what’s that whole “Your account is linked to PoolDues, LLC” thing mean? Well that’s nothing new. If you are a current client, our code is already sending and receiving calls on your behalf to PayPal, working its magic to get your payments initiated from your website and processed. Previously to make this happen we had to ask clients to give us Developer Access to their PayPal account. New clients would create a secondary user account within PayPal, grant access to the Developer area, then we would make the connections within their account (it was time consuming for everyone). Once the connection was made, we rarely ever logged back into the Developer area for the account unless there was a major issue. Many clients deleted the Developer User altogether (because we told them they could after things were up and running). With the Partner Platform, we no longer need Developer Access at all. The connection process mentioned above is what allows us to send and receive calls to PayPal on your behalf. It also gives us a consolidated view of those calls / responses in a single Developer account. So for example, if a buyer had an issue paying, we could probably tell you why now (without logging into your account as a Developer). Like all of our past cart upgrades, we eventually need all of our clients to do this so we don’t have deprecated code lingering around for a handful of slow-pokes. But unlike our past upgrades, this one actually saves you money! Yay.
So Pool Dues is a certified PayPal Partner. How bright exactly is the future?
As a certified PayPal Partner we’ve got a lot more tools to play with! It took us about half a year to get certified, working closely with a team at PayPal to get where we are today. And as excited as we are now, this also feels like just the beginning of things to come. A lot of what we have coded in the past half-year does exactly what we were doing before, just in a different way. Now we can focus on really leveraging these new tools for our clients. For example, because buyers can leave a card on file, that opens a whole world of possibilities. Members could opt into auto reloading their concession credit accounts when they fall below a certain threshold. Or if a household has a negative guest fee balance, the club could automatically charge the buyer if they haven’t settled it by a certain date. I’m sure our Treasurers out there reading this can imagine plenty more possibilities. Feel free to email us your ideas!
So yes, the future is bright… but Mondays still suck.
