On payment options

The XL Toolbox add-in is free software, you do not need to pay for it. I do however appreciate voluntary payments. They enable me to buy software needed to develop the Toolbox, and they provide some pocket money as a gratification for investing my time in this project.

I used to offer two payment options on the website: Paypal and Google Wallet. From March 2015 however, only Paypal remains.

Since I have received several complaints about not offering alternative payment methods, I would like to briefly explain the background.

Paypal makes it really simple to accept payments in a business model such as mine, and so did Google Wallet for Digital Goods. The latter however was terminated as of March 2, 2015.

Other payment providers have refused their services or have integration mechanisms that are much too complicated for my one-man business.

Amazon Payments interpret the volunatary payments for the Toolbox as “donations”. Of course, volunatary payments are not (charitable, deductible) donations at all. I have registered a business, and I pay tax on the income that the XL Toolbox generates. Unfortunately, with Amazon thinking I accept “donations”, they refused their service.

I have long tried to integrate ClickAndBuy, but the integration would not work properly, and ClickAndBuy’s customer service was not really very helpful at all.

Other providers only accept bigger companies, not one-man businesses.

So, for the time being, Paypal is the only way to go. If you have suggestions for additional payment service providers, let me know.

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