BuyButtonz Singapore

There’s been a buzz about BuyButtonz on the Singapore blogosphere recently, thanks largely to the clever marketing hype created by Andrew Peters (APLink). The BuyButtonz eCom & Bloggers Fair tomorrow at Far East Plaza will see the participation of online shopping merchants and the event will be streamed live at Ping.sg. One can only assume that an event of such scale is meant to be their official product launch?

To be perfectly honest, I’ve not read any of the promotional blog posts about BuyButtonz nor visited their website before today because I’d been working on reviving an old blog the entire week. Unfortunately, what drew my attention to BuyButtonz was Michael Cheng’s criticism over at his blog today that warned potential users to pay close attention to their Terms & Agreements.

That is the long explanation for the title of my blog post. :)

And in addition to that negative response on the eve of their launch, both the blogs for APLink and BuyButtonz seem to have been suspended too???

BuyButtonz Blog

So, what is BuyButtonz? Basically, it’s a service that lets online shopping merchants accept credit card and bank (via GIRO) payments from their customers. After the short registration, one simply enters the specifics (e.g. product name, pricing) to generate a button and then copy-and-paste a string of codes to stick the button to their website or blog - a familiar process if you’re a Paypal merchant.

BuyButtonz is a competitor to Paypal as can be seen from their reference to “Competitor P” in this comparison table (scroll to the bottom of the page). However, BuyButtonz’s comparison would naturally be slightly biased to their favour so I’d like to add 3 more observations based on my experience as a user of Paypal’s merchant services:

1. BuyButtonz charges you a recurring fee for each generated button (you need one button for each product), i.e. approximately S$2.80 per button per month. Paypal lets you generate an unlimited number of buttons FOC.

2. For payments via GIRO, BuyButtonz holds your payment until the 15th of the following month, whereas it’s instantaneous with Paypal.

3. You can only accept local payments with BuyButtonz because of the 2-factor authentication. Paypal lets you accept payments from almost anyone from anywhere in the world.

Still, BuyButtonz is definitely a commendable effort by local standards and I may use them myself if they can address my concerns. Finally, I wished that they’d come up with a more professional-looking website because if you want people to trust you with their money, you’d better look trust-worthy. ;)

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