The (New) Alternative Merchant Account & Payment Gateway

I promised a follow-up to Saturday's blog about PayPal's new payment
options (PayPal's $100 Million Dollar Bet) to tell you about PayPal
Direct Payment. Direct Payment is a feature of the Website Payments
Pro suite from PayPal. It's free to sign up, and the transaction fees
and discount rates are competitive with the leading payment gateways.
The best part is that bit where it's free to sign up. Account setup
fees for gateways typically range in the $49 to $149 range, and up.
What's more, Direct Payment is really the equivalent of having a
merchant account and a gateway, except that you don't need your own
merchant account; PayPal handles both aspects of the transaction (that
is, the merchant part, where the credit card transaction is
"authorized" and "captured", and the payment gateway part, where all
this takes place via the Internet). It's truly one-stop shopping from
PayPal, and even includes a virtual terminal, allowing you to manually
process your customers' credit card orders (and refunds/returns) using
a well-formatted web interface.

It will be interesting to watch PayPal walk on eggshells as they try
to continue selling the PayFlow Pro service they bought from VeriSign
while offering a highly competitive service with a completely
different cost structure. In any event, this author is very close to
ditching a certain popular payment gateway (and my merchant account)
for the PayPal Website Payments Pro suite. It's the convenience of one-
stop shopping that attracts me the most, but not having to manage my
own merchant account is attractive, too.

PayPal is serious about getting their solution out to the development
community, at one time even offering bounties for developers who
integrated PayPal solutions into their carts. QuickEStore was one of
the very first Cold Fusion carts to complete the rigorous PayPal
Certification process, and now offers built-in integration with PayPal
Website Payments Standard, PayPal Website Payments Pro, PayPal Express
Checkout, PayPal Payflow Pro and Payflow Link, AuthorizeNet, SkipJack
and LinkPoint.