PayPal goes after small biz

PayPal for pros

By John Oates, 21st June 2005

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Online payment specialist PayPal is going after small business customers with a package of services called Website Payments Pro.

The service offers three levels of service for different businesses - Express Checkout, Direct Payment API and Virtual Terminal.

Express Checkout is for PayPal account holders who will be able to pay for items in three clicks with shipping information sent from PayPal to the retailer's website.

Direct Payment is for customers without PayPal accounts who want to pay using a credit card. It allows buyers to put their card details straight into the retailer's site while PayPal looks after the back office stuff.

Finally Virtual Terminal is an online interface for staff taking credit card details over the telephone and entering them into PayPal.

The company says this will give merchants more control over the buying process because more of it takes place on their own site rather than on PayPal's. It also means even the smallest business can offer a choice of ways for customers to pay.

Pricing starts at $20 a month plus a charge of 30 cents and 2.2 to 2.9 per cent of every transaction. The monthly fee is being waived til later in the year.

You can read the whole press release here.

In other news yesterday PayPal released a developer kit for coders making applications which will interact with its payment system. More details here®