Paypal Offers Full Merchant Account – Payments Pro

Paypal has launched a new fully featured payment system called Payments Pro that includes the features of a payment gateway and merchant account.

A lot of web business owners currently use Paypal to process payments. Using the standard system a user is directed to the Paypal site to make the payment and then is returned to your site after payment is complete. The difference with the Payments Pro system is that the payment process is seamless – it integrates completely into your website so the user never leaves and never sees a Paypal page. They won’t even realise they have made a payment with Paypal unless you tell them.

The Payments Pro system requires you to be a little bit more technically proficient compared to the standard Paypal process. With the standard merchant system you only need to enter a hyperlink into your webpages to create “buy now” links for Paypal payments. With Payments Pro you will need to be familiar with at HTML, a scripting language and API programming, or have someone that can do it all for you.

The pricing model is quite reasonable, especially compared to bank merchant accounts. At the moment Paypal is waving the monthly fee until 31 October 2005 but will charge $20 per month plus the standard Paypal percentage fees per transaction. There are no setup fees and no long term contracts. If you have ever looked into getting a merchant account at a bank or with an e-commerce service provider you will be well aware that this Paypal offering is darn competitive. The only problem – currently the service is only available to USA merchants.

You can read more about the service at Paypal Payments Pro.