Paypal's recent introduction of their Website Payment Pro service has the potential to make much simpler and cheaper for small businesses to add ecommerce to their websites.

In my work with clients to find the right ecommerce solutions, 2 problems keep on reoccuring:

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.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 10th, 2005 at 12:22 pm and is filed under Ecommerce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.