Paypal Payments Standard v Payments Pro

[MyPrintUK]

Hi all,

Quick question:

We currently use Paypal Website Payments Standard as our payment processor. We are now converting over to Website Payments Pro. Do you think that Payments Standards may have lost us business to due to the hassle of customers being redirected to another site?

Looking at our stats there doesn't seem to be many orders abandoned at this stage i'm curious as to what you good people think.

Thanks

Lee

[awebapart]

Are you using a PayPal Business Account or Personal Account with PayPal Standard? If you are using a personal account, then people would not be able to make a payment without having their own paypal account. With a business account, people can make their credit and debit card payments directly without a paypal account. Having a personal account would put some people off, likewise having a business account and not explaining upfront that people can pay without a paypal account might put people off too (since it isn't always clear on the PayPal screen).

Whilst there is some hassle of offsite payments, you also have to balance this out with the issue of trust, i.e. are clients more comfortable entering their credit card details on the PayPal site (that they know, have used before, and trust) or on your site.

Hopefully adding paypal pro will give clients the choice, since you still have to allow customers to go offsite to paypal if they prefer (or to login), and it will be interesting to see what people choose.

[MyPrintUK]

Hi Paul,

We do use a Paypal business account and have page which informs customers that they can use their credit or debit card through paypal without having to create an account.

Before we had this page, we had numerous customers explaining that they didn't have a paypal account and therefor asking how else could they pay.

The page we created has a screen shot of the paypal checkout page highlighting where to click to pay via debit/credit card. Since then we have had no questions at all regarding making payment.

My main reason for changing to a integrated payment page is to give it a more professional look.

Thanks

Lee

[Fuzzy]

I have a standard business account with Paypal atm, have just set up Paypal pro, so will be interesting for me too

[123 Cart]

I think it goes without saying that keep clients on your site will always win over sending clients to 3rd party gateways.

But a massie benefit of Paypal Pro is you can offer direct online payments plus have a pay by paypal button which all ends up in the same account.

We have got a client at the moment who has seen a 15% increase now they have moved to paypal pro.

So good luck !

[Chell]

I am changing to Paypal Pro as soon as Paypal manage to change my name from my maiden name to my married name (causing problems as my married name is on the bank account linked to Paypal).

Another advantage of Paypal Pro is that you can take payments over the phone.

[awebapart]

We do use a Paypal business account and have page which informs customers that they can use their credit or debit card through paypal without having to create an account.

Sorrry Lee, I missed that page when looking at your site yesterday. I did look in the obvious places like near the shipping link at the bottom (FAQ link at bottom isn't working), or whether the paypal logo clicked on to another page. I didn't look in the Information dropdown menu at the top.

I would recommend that you have a rethink on the 'Information' menu as it is not obvious and not what most people are used to when visiting an ecommerce site. Take or copy the Payment, Terms, and About Us out of this dropdown and make them more prominent on every page - like you have already done with Shipping and Contact Us.

Before we had this page, we had numerous customers explaining that they didn't have a paypal account and therefor asking how else could they pay.

Yes, one of my bug bears with PayPal is that they don't make it obvious to users on the Standard payments page that the user can do this, even though they make a big song and dance about this feature to merchants on the general PayPal site. The paypal payment page is a prime example of bad copywriting and bad UI design which results in a very useful feature being easily missed - whether or not this is intentional or not (to encourage people to sign up to PayPal) is another matter.

The page we created has a screen shot of the paypal checkout page highlighting where to click to pay via debit/credit card.

Excellent.

Since then we have had no questions at all regarding making payment.

If you make the page even more prominent, you might even reduce your dropouts too (those who wont bother asking questions and just leave).

[awebapart]

I think it goes without saying that keep clients on your site will always win over sending clients to 3rd party gateways.

I don't agree with this. If you are talking merely from a user interface point of view then yes it does go without saying that taking users through any process will always be easier on just the one site. However when you take into account the big issue of trust, and how confident a user feels about submitting their all-important credit card details to a particular website/company, then the use of a more trusted third party website like PayPal or WorldPay is more important.

I usually get a lot of flack for saying this on forums, as it seems that almost everyone assumes that onsite payment processing is better than offsite payment processing. Perhaps it is because I'm too cautious and a bit too close to the subject matter working in web development and banking (in a previous life). All I can say is that I'm very careful about which sites I enter my credit card details on. Do I enter them on a site owned by a small business who has spent a few hundred or perhaps a few thousand pounds on their website, possibly still running their website on shared hosting where anyone can open a hosting account and run server-side code, or do I enter my credit card details on a site like PayPal or WorldPay whose owners have invested millions in their security setup, who have security professionals working fulltime to keep their site safe from hackers, and QA/auditing/procedures in place similar to banking environment?

A common misconception is that a SSL certificate means that a site is secure. SSL - secure sockets layer - merely means that the connection between the web browser and the website is 'secure' (encrypted) and there is some level of vetting of the site owner depending on what level/cost of SSL certificate is used (from £8 per year less, almost zero, vetting, to several hundred pounds per year more vetting). The important thing is that it doesn't mean a site is secure (safe from hackers trying to inject code to syphon of credit card details on the processing page) nor does it mean that the site owner has to act responsibly with that data, what happens after your credit card details arrive at the site is anyone's guess.

Flipping this issue around 180 degrees, put yourself in the hacker's shoes, trying to hack into a website to obtain credit card details. Do you target the PayPals and the WorldPays who have invested millions in security, or do you target the small business website who has decided to take onsite payments? Even if a website is not storing credit card details, which most shouldn't, a hacker could get in and place code on the processing page to tap the data off unobtrusively when the credit card details are received by the server.

This might sound like scaremongering, and I'm sorry if it does, but I like to err on the side of caution and I honestly believe that onsite processing is not the way to go for most small businesses, and I've only mentioned a few of the reasons why here. If you are a small business that is growing more into a medium size business then onsite processing will become more appropriate. That is if you are at the stage where sales are increasing, and you can afford to invest in a more secure website setup, preferably avoiding standard shared hosting and moving onto a more dedicated server solution, and you are investing in every other part of your website to ensure it looks professional (if you haven't taken the time to do this then how can you expect people to assume you have taken the time to do other more important things like make your site secure).

But again that is just my opinion, my 2c (and I will be expecting the usual flames I get when I say this). As I mentioned, there is a lot of public misconception about this whole thing, there is also public misconception about PayPal too, and perhaps there are cases where onsite procesing will increase sales because of this misconception (and perhaps on the ease of checkout issue, rather than anything else like professionalism or trust). After all, there are some people who don't like paying online at all, and prefer to phone in with their credit cards, even though this is possibly the least safe way of them all.

But a massie benefit of Paypal Pro is you can offer direct online payments plus have a pay by paypal button which all ends up in the same account.

Yes I agree with this, and if you are getting a mix of the two payment methods into the one account, it might also push your one total up in order to qualify for lower transaction rates.

[123 Cart]

I think the biggest point of all this is to offer clients a choice.

So in ways we are both right.

Just my experiece says they you will get clients who will not proceed with orders because you are using third party gateways to take payments which in return means you are a small business.

Also another point most credit card frauds on the net are not due to stolen information on the net rather than a stolen wallet etc being used on the net.


But the biggest thing is CHOICE. clients need a choice.

:-)

[awebapart]

Also another point most credit card frauds on the net are not due to stolen information on the net rather than a stolen wallet etc being used on the net.

You mentioned you have experience in PayPal pro with at least one of your clients, I have no experience of implementing PayPal pro due to my off-site processing bias (and the types of clients we have), so I'd be grateful if you could shed some light on the following questions related to PayPal Pro please:

If a buyer has a credit card associated with their PayPal account, can they still just pay directly by entering their credit card details on the onsite PayPal Pro page, or do they have to login to PayPal?

With PayPal Standard they would have to login, this is an added security precaution to protect those people that might have had their card information or card stolen and used by someone else.

If PayPal Pro does not provide this extra level of security then do they provide other security checks like 3D-secure onsite instead to combat this fraud problem?

If PayPal Pro does not require PayPal login for a credit card associated with a PayPal account, and it does not implement other similar security checks like 3D-secure, then it is more open to fraudulent transactions from stolen credit cards than PayPal Standard.