Lessons - Why PayPal and Shopify Will Sabotage Your Business | David Carlin, Co-Founder of Residual Payments

Welcome to Lessons episodes of Success Story, part of the HubSpot podcast network. These lessons episodes will be shorter conversations with past guests, valued members of the success story community, and myself. They'll be focused on teaching you actionable, insightful takeaways that you can use to upskill your personal and professional life. This particular industry that you're in, that you're teaching people to do, that it's not just owned by Stripe or by Square or by all these other check-ups, and now you're seeing more of them in the news, you're seeing Fast in the news, and you're seeing all these other companies in the new, like that was actually just a huge bust, right? So walk me through the industry, help me understand what the average person can do and why there's this misconception that the stripes of the world own all the check-outs online. Yeah, I mean most people, well actually here's the thing, I have a lot of clients who use Stripe and PayPal. I keep them all every redundancy. How many people saw online where they do $100,000 in Stripe won't give them more volume or PayPal won't give them more volume, but they just hired a marketing company and now they do a half a million, I fill in that 400,000 or whatever it may be, right? So sometimes I'll tell people, like don't get rid of PayPal, if someone wants to pay with PayPal and they have money in their PayPal account, don't lose a sale over me, take that money, you know, like so at the same time if you want to do Stripe, people, it's ease of use, right? Stripe, et cetera, did a great job, which no shout out to Stripe, but good, you guys did a good job, leave me that. But, you know, ease of instantly approved, right? But Stripe is what's called an aggregator, right? And essentially as quick as you're approved, as quick as you can be shut down, we hear all those horror stories and money being held, accounts getting shut down a lot too, especially if PayPal and the same thing. And you just wait, right? So you're essentially renting a home when you go with Stripe or PayPal, when you're going with the Tristle merchant account, which is what we teach, you're owning a home, right? You're making sure that you're fully compliant, you're going through extra steps, but everyone's like, why don't I do the paperwork, Dave? I don't want to take the extra day to do it because Stripe gets me approved in 10 minutes. I'm like, what happened six months from now when all your money's held and you can't fulfill your orders and your whole company goes on there because you didn't want to do one day of work? What does that sound like, right? So, you know, when it comes to the payments, you know, this is, that's the easiest thing I've ever had to do is land merchant accounts to make residual income. I used to literally golf almost every single day, work from like, literally this cell phone. That is it. Creating a coaching or a training platform, whatever the hell you want to call it is the hardest thing I've ever had to do in my life. And we unintentionally started teaching people because people were asking us exactly to the context of this conversation and exactly how I met my wife. What are you doing on that phone? You know, how did you buy that? What are you doing? How can I do it? So we started teaching people offline and once we saw a holy crap, people could do this. That's the only reason why we built the platform. So yes, do we teach you how to win over Striper PayPal? Do we teach you how to win over new businesses, existing businesses? Yes, that is one part of the equation is the merchant account, setting up the credit card of the debit card processing. We show people how to be brand payments and business consultants. After you set up the merchant account or switch them over or whatever it is, we then show you how to add all the other value added services from branding, payroll, marketing, gift cards, buy it out, pay later, blah, blah, blah, blah. Any other ways you could help that business owner automate their business so they can be more profitable and more efficient, solidifies your relationship. You're not a one trick pony where you just sell or sling merchant accounts. The person that is starting a business, not the people that you're teaching over, but the person that's actually starting a business, the entrepreneur, say they want to start dropshipping and they open up, I want to understand, so to like lay it out, super simple people understanding, because not everybody here has ever even operated in Shopify. So you open up a Shopify account, maybe you have some sort of plug in that the dropships products and then you're presented with all the standardized checkout options. And I'm sure there's like the Shopify option and you're probably going to get some ads for like PayPal integration and Stripe and whatnot. So where it is your, I understand all the value add stuff, but where is your core product? Where does that fit into the stack and how do they actually execute that if I'm starting a store from scratch? So if someone's starting a Shopify store, the next step is to cancel your Shopify store. I mean, no, it's good. I like it because all these easy options, they've been, they've had so much explosive growth because they they're so easy, so simple, right? But obviously, doesn't cost it comes with that. If you don't, what happens is Shopify did great job, shout out to them too, sort of you should partner with us so we can stop competing. But I'm sure you don't care about this, but Shopify, if you build a Shopify store and you love it, it's great because it's of use again, right? That's how Stripe and everyone's getting in Shopify ease of use, right? Because no one wants to do any work as we know. So they get people set up, they set you up with Shopify payments. What they don't tell you is once you're all set up, you did all that hard work and you built your whole store and you loved the way it works, you're paying essentially, if you ever were to leave Shopify payments, but keep your Shopify store and call a person like me to switch over your payment processing, but keep the same exact store, Shopify can charge even more up to 1% for you not to use their payment processing, which makes it almost impossible for someone like myself to save you money. Now, with that being said, set in the same breath, we have a liar, higher risk merchants, whether it's their business model, the way they run their business, the products they sell, what have you where people don't care about incurring that fee because they need to, they need the volume, right? They need to keep scaling their company. So I would try to help someone move off to a different platform or plug into Shopify. What happens is Shopify, WooCommerce WordPress, whatever you want to sell on, you want to sell what we do is you fill out an application, takes you 10 minutes, you get approved, and then we just give the, let me give it a simplest terms, it's a few numbers that come, that you plug in the numbers in your backend, it's like unplugging from one Wi-Fi network and plugging into another one, like an API key, like would it be like an API key? Yeah, yeah, I didn't know if we could go that, but you can go that, no numbers. You just keep it simple, that's good. That's all it is, then triggers to the new merchant account. Okay, so everything front-facing stays exactly the same. Okay, and that API key, what you're doing is now you're creating a direct relationship with the payment process, so you're skipping the tech piece, and then you're getting a much lower rate on that. That's what, that's what you're actually teaching over. So imagine, imagine staying, let's say, yeah, let's make it, now you would be, imagine having a retail store that stays exactly the same, but your landlord calls you and say, hey, I'm gonna lower your rent, but everything stays the same. Gotcha, month. So what would you recommend for somebody starting, is for somebody starting to sell online, what would be the best setup? What do you recommend if somebody starts to subscribe to it? Listen, I need to, I need to figure out how to set up a store, you were just on to talking to the podcast, I don't want to go shopify, how do I set up from, from scratch? Everyone's completely different, right? So I don't, just like I don't, in our team, we don't send like automated messages online, like, you're like an entrepreneur like me, like we don't do a, like everyone's completely different, right? And I have a conversation, just like I do with anybody else, usually in a gray sweatshirt, because I have 5,000 of them. And what are you selling? What are we, what are we going to set you up with today? That's going to be good for you for another year or two or three. We don't want to have to redo this again, right? Where do you think your company's going to be in two years? What do you, because a lot of people, as we know, they buy crazy point of sale systems, or crazy terminals, or crazy automation online. And sometimes it's so robust that you don't even use 90% of it, right? Some people are just starting out, and they're like, I need to build out a crazy website, I need a web developer, I'm like, how many products do you have? I'm like, too, like why not just do one quick landing pages, right? I have ones that you could get created in two seconds, and literally have that link for that one product. Or I have people that built out Shopify stores with 500 products, and I'm like, uh, do the all, do all of these sell? They're like, no, only these five. Well, what are we doing? You're maintaining all these products. They don't even make you money. So everyone's completely different. I just learned about their business, and then depending on their business, the funds they have to start that business, I gear them in the right direction. Why do I do that? One, because I'm out of asshole. I'm a good person. But number two, I always tell my clients in the beginning, if you listen to me, because I've been in payments with my wife for over 30 years combined, we get to see the best market, the best brand, the best of everything, because I see people's numbers. It can't lie. I see their sales, right? And if I point you in the right direction with the right platform, with the right merchant account, with the right x, y and z that you specifically need for your business, I number one, going to solidify that relationship with you. And number two, if I can show you how to make more money, can I make more money? No one's ever said no to me on that, right? So I'm saying to listen to what I'm saying, because I have a very vested interest for you to stay in business and for you to be successful, because as long as you're in business, I make money.