As of yesterday, we have transitioned our payment system from Amazon Payments to PayPal.

If you are a store owner, you now need to have a PayPal email address listed in your Store Admin Panel in order to keep getting paid. We tried to give people a heads-up as we were transitioning, so hopefully everyone got a chance to enter their PayPal account into their store.

People have asked us why we went through the trouble of transitioning away from Amazon Payments when it was working perfectly well. I already explained the main reasons over on Emptees.com, but I thought I’d repost here so everyone can get a chance to see it. Here were our key influencers in our decision to ditch Amazon Payments for PayPal:

1. We can now have international stores.

It’s our goal to allow businesses from every country on earth to take part in the Storenvy community. However, Amazon Payments doesn’t allow non-US businesses to accept payments or even register. We’ve already had quite a few disappointed would-be Canadian and UK Storenvy store owners get their hearts broken by the US-only restriction. We’d asked Amazon when they would expand internationally, and their (optimistic) timeline was longer than we or our users wanted to wait. PayPal is available in 190 countries and regions and accepts 19 currencies.

2. Amazon’s evil 14-day reserve.

Amazon has a very subtle policy that can really cause a headache. In the first six months of opening your account, each sale you make is held for two weeks before you can withdraw it. You just see the money sitting there, but you can’t get to it. This would really hurt if you had a successful store and for the first two weeks, you’re running to the post office every day paying out of pocket for shipping expenses because Amazon won’t even let you withdraw the money people have paid you for shipping and handling! And this isn’t just for the first two weeks. You’re always two weeks behind on money. Receive $5 on the 1st of the month and you can’t withdraw it until the 15th. Receive $250 on the 13th, and wait to withdraw it until the 27th. We couldn’t do that to you guys. It’s a strict policy that Amazon has put into place to reduce fraud, but somehow PayPal has made much less strict policies work, and we have to just go with the solution that makes everything easier on our users.

3. Internet users are used to PayPal and don’t need as much education on it upfront.