Hey - one of the founders of GoCardless here.

We have found that conversion can be just as good, if not better than cards in the right cases. The biggest factor that affects this is transaction type.

We see really great conversion for repeat billing where Direct Debit is already a well known method of payment. Conversion is not as good for one-off payments where DD is less expected though.

I appreciate the honesty and lack of 'spin'.

I was considering GoCardless but a survey of my customers stopped me.

We switched from PayPal to GoCardless for one off payments and we haven't found any problems amongst our customer base. We occasionally have to explain the mechanics behind it but generally people get it and prefer it to not having the faff of a PayPal login.

That was definitely one of the concerns that we had when we decided not to implement GoCardless last year for a product. Paying by direct debit is such an unusual process online outside of Paypal and magazine subscriptions, that it's easy to imagine conversions will suffer.

Did you test any of this, or is that just your gut speaking?

Some people have funny ideas about how DD works, not realizing it's extremely consumer friendly and much smaller fees than credit cards.

I was thinking of offering both as my brief play with GoCardless was very easy to implement.

Tim here - I work at GoCardless.

That's what we recommend. It's super easy to sign up and integrate so it's absolutely worth signing up and just giving it a go. That way you can see whether it works for you and your customers.