Chazz,
You are quite right, this is why we dont accept paypal (too dear, same for Amex)
Rcracer,
Glad your bits turned up nice and quick
bigred5765,
Valid point about Paypal being some people ONLY method, but to be fair "most" people do have a "card" of some sort or failing that a relative who can loan them one or let them use one. PayPal is sometimes nice to use though if the funds are already in the PP account there waiting to be spent, many people almost treat it as forgotten funds and dont miss it when they spend it.
Our aim is to keep our prices as low as physically possible at the shop and we deemed that any item that we can save just 1% on is worth it (let alone as much as 4%) from our selling prices. We have gained sales over other shops many times in the past because we are £5 less (2.5%) on a £200 kit (I am quite sure we have probably lost sales for being £5 dearer too in some instances) so people in general do tend to shop for the best deals, no matter how small, the saving.
There is though one other crucial factor in why we as one retialer dont use Paypal and that is the "dictor style" policy they employ over refunds and money back to the customer!!! We had several instance (mostly connected with our old eBay transactions) where by a customer would buy somthing, recieve it (we had proof on several occasions) THEN make out they never got it!! Paypal deduct the money straight away from seller and refund the buyer, which is impossible to deal with from a traders point of view. We had one customer who ordered some foam tyres, he paid we sent them, he even phoned the next day to ask which ones went on the front and which on the back, describing them as they were in his hand! The next thing we know we had a claim for non-recieving and the money taken away from us. We pleaded our case, the customer said he never phoned us at all, tried to imply it must of been another customer who brought the same items from us on our listing who contacted us (yet he was the only buyer from this buy it now listing who purchased them) and that he had never seen them. We were not allowed to process a claim from Royal Mail to settle the matter the refund was simply given, the item was only £24 in toal so was sent 1st class post, no signature on delivery, could not proove 100% that goods were delivered so lost the case!!! Joke.
We had a total of three cases similiar to this with Paypal transactions and it forced us to close our eBay clearout store down (since Paypal was the prefered method for payment) before we had a "big" forced/fraudulent refund inflicted on us.
Dont forget also the charges dont stop with the transaction on Paypal there are withdrawl fees etc also plus the time it takes for them to transfer money from PP to your bank (5 days??), as conveneient as it is, it is just too costly for most retail bonafied business's to consider as an option