Best Merchant Account Service Providers 2022 – Forbes Advisor
Since 1998, PayPal has steadily cemented its position on the web as one of the most popular and trusted methods for accepting and making payments. PayPal provides useful integrations including WooCommerce, Magento, BigCommerce, and Wix. As mentioned earlier, PayPal does not integrate with Stripe.
PayPal offers standard merchant tools such as billing features, data exports, reporting dashboards, and an API key. Additionally, PayPal offers easy PCI compliance through various certifications, programs, and standards.
As popular as PayPal is with shoppers, it lags behind other merchant service providers largely because of its fees:
- Online business transactions: 2.9% + flat fee ($0.30)
- In-store business transactions: 2.7% + flat fee ($0.30)
- Encrypted transactions: 3.5% + flat fee ($0.30)
The “flat fee” is ultimately determined by your local currency. Additionally, PayPal charges a 1.5% surcharge for international transactions.
PayPal has hardware available to merchants through Zettle. The equipment ranges from a simple card reader to a complete kit. You can ultimately pay as little as $29 for a single card reader (each subsequent card reader is $79) or $699 for a full store kit.
Monthly service charge
PayPal allows you to offer your customers advanced credit and debit payments at no additional cost. If you need more options, PayPal offers a tiered monthly payment structure.
Advanced payments: This feature costs $5 per month. With Payments Advanced, allow your customers to pay by credit or debit card without leaving your website. This PayPal service offers the ability to customize an integrated payment page for your customers.
Pro Payments: At $30 per month, Pro offers similar features to Payment Advanced in that you have a customizable payment option. However, Payments Pro gives you the option to bill using credit cards, PayPal credits, and PayPal accounts. Additionally, you can easily integrate shopping cart integration, APIs, online billing, and the ability to offer credit card payments over the phone.
Payments Pro payment flow: For $30 a month, you can customize your online payment page however you like, changing everything from language to page sequence. It is even possible to adjust the PCI compliance factors. Merchants can offer PayPal credit, add buttons, and use hosted pages.
Virtual terminal: This service costs $30 per month and allows merchants to accept virtually any credit or debit card. Merchants can run Virtual Terminal on virtually any device, allowing greater flexibility in serving customers. Finally, Virtual Terminal helps you manage your reports by allowing you to track transactions and activities with relative ease. The interface is simple, no coding knowledge is needed to get the most out of it.
Despite a diverse range of services for merchants, what works against PayPal is its high transaction fees. Additionally, PayPal sometimes puts long holds on transactions, sometimes for no apparent reason. Although PayPal may use fraud issues to justify its behavior, the combination of fees and withholdings may deter some business owners. Particularly those who cannot risk costly delays with funding being held back.
These concerns aside, PayPal remains a well-known and frequently used service, so much so that it’s easy to justify merchants, especially those operating online, giving it a chance.
Who should use it:
PayPal is a great service for small business owners, especially those who primarily operate online stores or own e-commerce stores.
