Paypal's recent introduction of their Website Payment Pro service has the potential to make much simpler and cheaper for small businesses to add e-commerce to their websites.
In my work with clients to find the right ecommerce solutions, 2 problems keep on reoccurring:
Setup fees and running fees are high
It can cost hundreds of dollars just to get setup, and it's difficult to find a solution for less than $50/month even if you're not selling anything.
Integration between the parties can be difficult
There can be up to 4 parties involved, each wanting their slice of the action and each of which needs to be able to work with the other:
- the shopping cart software on your site
- the payment gateway
- the merchant account
- the bank account
If one of these cannot integrate with the other you are in trouble.
With their new service, Paypal potentially removes these obstacles by getting rid of a few middlemen and charging less:
the prices on the left are a little high, but you get the idea
So in effect you get a payment gateway and merchant credit card account in one go, and for no set-up fees. Also there is no one-year obligation. Looks pretty good, but I will let you know how it fares once I get the chance to use it.
Tweet