Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi all,
I`ve been searching the boards (and the net) for merchant account info today. I currently hand-key my internet sales into ProPay. My ProPay year is just about to end and I need to renew or get out. The thing is, my sales are going up since I started wholesaling and the ProPay fees are kind of high, plus I just don`t have the time to hand-key the cards. I`d rather have it all integrated. Plus I`ve had a couple of declined cards that backed things up because I had to contact the buyer and explain thet their card was declined, get a new card, etc. (Embarrassing for both parties!) I looked at merchant accounts and gateways, etc. and just feel it`s too much for me to deal with right now. I use Mal`s Premium for a cart and I am thinking I might go with PayPal Pro. It`s $240 a year ($20/mo) for PayPal Pro, but with my volume I`d probably have to pay the $120 ProPay fee anyway plus the higher percentages, transfer fees - plus hand-key. I`m kind of leaning toward PayPal Pro. I also like how the shipping is integrated with PayPal. What a time saver! (Is there any way to get that PayPal logo off of the label?? Ugh.) The only thing that scares me is PayPal`s lack of support / customer service.

What do you think? Any advice?
Thanks guys! I love this forum! You are all so helpful!

Hey Christine - first off, congrats on your success, sounds like you have some good problems!  As far as PayPal is concerned, yes you`re going to have issues with service at times.  But having dealt with other merchant account vendors, I can tell you that many of them aren`t much better.

What you do get with PayPal is a system with which millions on people are familiar and likely already have accounts - the market acceptance makes it a relatively painless way to go.  Having also used the Pro service to run a merchant account, I can say that the process of handling declines/refunds/etc. is far easier with PayPal than with other services.

So if you`re up to that level, I`d probably go with PayPal.


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chuck fuller

Thanks Chuck! Yes, I am at the point of upgrading. I already do offer PayPal but I`m just not using Pro yet. I`ve been typing manually into ProPay which at this point is taking up too much time.

Thanks for your input! I think I`m going to start the switch this week.

We have used Payments Pro on a couple of projects and I have not been impressed.  The functionality was similar to traditional gateways like Authorize.net, however, there were some additional limitations with Payments Pro and I felt the integration was overly complicated. We began using Payments Pro right after it became available and we experienced several problems with the service, however, the service may be improved now that it has had a few months to mature. I have worked with 7 different gateways including Paypal Payments Pro. Authorize.net is my favorite both in functionality and ease of integration.  I am not familiar with ProPay but I thought I would way in on my negative experience with Paypal Payments Pro.

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Ryan Stemkoski
Zipline Communicatioins
www.gozipline.com

Thanks Zipline. What were the limitations that you had? I know PayPal itself is kind of limited, such as with discounts and vouchers. I use the Mal`s E-Commerce premium cart and am just looking for PayPal to process the credit cards. Mal`s can handle everything else fairly well. Mal`s is supposedly a preferred cart with PayPal Pro and vice versa, so I figured the integration would be okay. I hope I`m not getting myself into a mess. I think I`ll go onto the Mal`s forums and see if there are any issues. Thanks again!

If you are using Mal’s you will probably be fine. When the service was first released we had several problems where Paypal would take orders and act like the card had been processed properly when in fact the user had entered invalid information.  They got this problem sorted out about the time we moved away.  The main limitation I was referring to was the requirement to show the Paypal buy it now at Paypal button as opposed to just running the cards locally.  To comply with their terms of use you must show that button. It doesn’t sound like that will be a problem in your case; however, we did not want to include that button on our products. Good luck! I hope it works better for you than it did for us. :) I have had great success with Paypal over the years but as an initial user of this system I was unimpressed. (Also note: The Paypal Payments Pro requires a special SDK so you may want to check with your web host to ensure they are capable of offering these to you before you make the transition.)

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Ryan Stemkoski
Zipline Communicatioins
www.gozipline.com

Thanks Ryan. Yes, they just love to put their logo everywhere don`t they? I was actually wondering something about the logo. When you ship through them using PayPal they put the PayPal logo on the USPS label. I enjoy the integrated shipping but I really don`t want a PayPal logo on the labels if the customer paid with Visa. KWIM? I`m curious about that. I thin if a person specifically chooses to use Visa instead of PayPal, then they shouldn`t have to see a PayPal logo on their package. It`s cheesy.

 

By the way, what is an SDK? I don`t think my host would have anything to do with it since all transactions go through Mal`s. My site simply has the POST command and Mal`s has the cart and payment processing. It`s not on my site as soon as someone hits "add to cart".

Ugh, so much to learn! My brain hurts.

SDK is an abbreviation for the term: Software Development Kit.  It is basically a set of pre-built components Paypal put together that web developers use when creating their processing code. If the ecommerce portion of your website is hosted elsewhere then you won’t have to worry about it, lucky! All you will have to do is count your money. ;)

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Ryan Stemkoski
Zipline Communicatioins
www.gozipline.com

So far the counting doesn`t take very long, but hopefully someday it will.