PayPal has been around now for quite some time. It’s always been a choice for Internet marketers looking for easy ways to get and send money. Then eBay purchased PayPal and pretty much made it a household name for people doing all sorts of commerce on the Internet.
Many people are familiar with PayPal only as an easy way to send and receive payments online to and from PayPal users, but they offer so much more. As a business account holder you can set-up a full suite of online tools and accept many forms of payment, including standard credit card transactions, from non PayPal users.
About a year ago PayPal purchased the real-time processing gateway from Verisign, a proven name in this field, and completed, in my opinion, the total online and offline ecommerce solution.
Reliably and securely accepting forms of payment over the Internet is a bit of a feat really. There are so may moving parts that must be hooked together to make it work.
At the very least you need:
- Internet merchant account to accept and process credit card payments online
- Don’t forget that you’ll need American Express and Discover account separately
- PayPal account integration to offer the PayPal payment option for PayPal users
- ACH account if you want to accept checks online as a form of payment
- Real time processing to get authorization of those cards instantly during a transaction
- Secure shopping cart to offer products and services and shopping experience safely
- Delivery mechanism for any digital products
In many instances ecommerce sites get the tools above working by linking together up to five separate vendors with five different fees attached.
If you are in this boat or considering ecommerce for your online marketing take a good hard look at PayPal for your merchant account, gateway and perhaps even shopping cart. They have put together a tool called PayFlow Pro that works very well with many shopping carts and are very aggressive with merchant account and gateway fees, including currently waving set-up fees that can run in excess of $500 from some vendors.
At the very least it has become a standard practice to offer the PayPal Express Payment option and equip your shopping carts with the code to hand a payment off to PayPal from a PayPal user.
