By Peter Chiu
20th March 2014
Posted in Ecommerce, Ecommerce Website Design, Payment Gateways, Technology & Software News
PayPal is one of the world’s leading and most recognisable payment gateway options in the world. With an estimated 110 million people in the world who shop with PayPal, it can be a great choice for many e-commerce websites.
As standard PayPal accept all major debit and credit cards and it is an easy way to accept payment in up to 24 currencies from a total of 190 countries.
Another advantage of using an established and well known provider such as PayPal is the ability to take advantage of PayPal’s built in data security and fraud protection.
Having chosen PayPal as your payment acceptance method, next is the choice of which form of integration is right for your website. The two integrations we are looking at here are two of the most popular, PayPal Standard and PayPal Pro.
PayPal Standard
The standard version is the base integration offered and is a popular option with many ecommerce websites due to the fact that there is no monthly fee and no contract.
As previously mentioned all integrations accept all major debit and credit cards and are capable of accepting multiple currencies.
With the standard integration, a customer would shop on your website as per normal but when they reach the checkout stage and are ready to pay; they are then redirected off to PayPal where they are able to pay via debit/credit card or via their own PayPal account. Upon completion of the transaction, they can then be redirected back to your website.
All card data/payment data is collected and stored on their servers and this simplifies PCI compliance as no sensitive payment data is collected on your website.
PayPal Pro
The Pro version is the next step up from the standard version and this integration incurs a monthly fee however like PayPal standard, there is no contract to be tied to.
PayPal Pro includes all the same features as the standard version such as multi-currency and acceptance of all major credit and debit cards.
The main difference that your users will be able to see is that with PayPal Pro, users will not be redirected off site to process their payment. The added advantage with this is that you are able to produce a clean and seamless checkout process with a consistent design.
The other additional feature which the Pro version allows is the added ability to process and accept card payments via phone, fax and mail via the Virtual Terminal.
Both of these integrations are available in major ecommerce platforms such as Drupal, Magento and Bigcommerce so whatever your ecommerce solution, PayPal is an option available to you.
If you’re considering integrating PayPal in to your ecommerce site, or you need advice on which integration type to use, feel free to contact Rapid Web Services to discuss this further. We can be contacted by phone on 01785 250 222 or by email on contact@rapidweb.biz