What are the security risks when using Venmo or Paypal for business transactions and is one of them better than the other? I am looking at using an app to sell products for my business, and they only allow me to offer Venmo or Paypal. I do not have a business account for either of these platforms.
That’s a good question. I do not have a definitive answer for you, but I will share some information that will hopefully help.
First, I don’t like or recommend either one of them. So I consider this a “which is the lesser of two evils” sort of question.
PayPal definitely has more security and privacy features. PayPal, for example, you can add 2FA and a passkey. I don’t see how to do either with Venmo. Venmo by default has all transactions publicly visible (see this post). Which is horrible to begin with and indicative of their general approach. On the other hand PayPal owns Venmo and recently started selling some of your private shopping data this year, so they aren’t exactly on my good list.
From what I can see online, the assertion is that PayPal has much stronger buyer and seller protections. I didn’t take time yet to research and confirm that and don’t know the details, but anecdotally, my suspicion is that it’s accurate. If this is of value to you, I would look closer.
Another significant point of comparison that I recommend looking at are the fees you will pay because it looks like Venmo may have lower fees.
PayPal owns Venmo (since 2013). This is not necessarily a problem, just good to be aware of. They may feel like competitors, but in reality they aren’t. From what I can tell, PayPal is targeted at business much more so than Venmo. They continue to expand their business oriented services with PayPal like with PayPal Open. Venmo is primarily app oriented – their website is lousy, and if anything has gotten worse over the years from what I’ve seen, so this reinforces to me that Venmo is less of a business offering - targeted more at person to person rather than for businesses to sell with.
Obviously both Venmo and PayPal both support businesses taking payments, so the fact that PayPal is more business oriented may not matter depending on exactly what you want to do with it now, and longterm. From what I already know of your business, selling foods in person, I think there’s a fair chance most of the fancy PayPal business stuff may not matter, but I haven’t compared them deeply from this perspective.
When I have purchased things from people in person - either at a farmer’s market, or local listings, it’s been almost exclusively Venmo (or other non PayPal options like Square), for years now. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s sort of a vote for Venmo.
I’m happy to explore and discuss further if you have more details you want to dig into together. 
P.S. Here are a couple of links I found that may be of value:
Thank you so much for all this info and clarification. As far as the fees go, the app I’m looking at selling with charges 15% and that covers all fees, taxes, etc. it sounds like PayPal is the better option even though I’m not thrilled with it.