PayPal Credit Card Transaction Services provides a variety of different methods for you to get paid by credit card.
In addition to setup procedures for payment transactions there are 2 basic ways to get funds sent to you. You should understand this before you pick a method of transaction.
For a small number of transactions you can choose to either have the money directly deposited in your bank account or have a check sent to you. If your transaction level is really limited then you can use the money within your account to fund your online purchases at Ebay or other online shops that accept paypal. Transactions from standard accounts do not have a monthly fee but do cost a percentage of the payment just like any business that accepts credit cards.
If you have a large number of transactions you will definitely want to setup either a dedicated standard account for your business or a Pro – Merchant Account. The difference between a merchant account and a standard account that you should be most aware of include: Monthly Service Fee, Same transaction fee as standard accounts, Shopping Carts are required, offline purchase are also available because you can enter your customers Credit Card info over a webform at the end of the day or at a point of sales unit like a cashier.
If you need to get into offline payment such as billing customers for services you contract at their site then Merchant Services are definitely worth the $30 a month and the application process.
Instant Payments
Buttons
If your online store will sell only a few products or if you are asking people to donate to your cause (and that cause could be lunch) then you can generate a number of instant payment buttons within your account so that your visitors can click and pay.
For Button Payments the visitor will be sent to PayPals website and they have the option of logging in and using their account or paying directly with a credit card.
The important thing about generating buttons within your PayPal account is that the button code is encrypted. This alleviates the problem of someone copping your button and buying a $50 product for $5. Although even if they did that you would still be able to log into your PayPal account and see who they are and how much they paid for what product.
Shopping Carts
There are a number of Shopping carts that support PayPal’s payment gateway and they may provide more or less features depending on how well the developer implemented all the tools that PayPal provides.
As we said Encryption is important so when you decide to use a shopping cart you can’t generate buttons for thousands of products and reset their prices in a reasonable amount of time.
For this situation you need public key encryption. This is managed by logging into your PayPal account and getting your Access Key. The key will be used to encrypt the data sent to paypal from your shopping cart.
Depending on your Account type you will be able to choose from about 100 different shopping cart solutions and although some carts are found in both account types some are not. If you need to use a specific cart then review the availability within your account.
Instant Payment Notification
Now everyone wants to know the second that someone sends them money but IPN is better utilized by your shopping cart and webs server. You have probably come across IPN services if you have ever signed up for a website hosting account. You select the account you want for hosting then pay. Immediately your Account is setup and you should be logging in and setting up your domains within a few minutes.
The way they know that you paid for your hosting account instead of just giving you an account and trusting until they can login to PayPal and verify it the next day is that PayPal sends back a notice of the transaction to the server and updates your account status automatically.
There are a few options for IPN you can send the customer back to the same place they were at checkout or if you were selling digital downloads you could sent them to the download page or you could do about anything you needed by having the customer return to a specific url that your servers application can process.
Note
So now you know the differences and advantages of Standard and Merchant accounts on PayPal. For the most part you can do everything you can with a Standard account that you can with a Merchant account but there are some advantaged to a Merchant account especially if you are processing a number of transactions every day.
For more information visit PayPal and checkout their Developer information.
www.paypal.com
