PayPal has four major eCommerce services and products for for different needs. They are ...
This is the easiest to implement and requires only HTML knowledge. It provides "Buy Now", "Donation", "Subscribe", and "Add to Cart" buttons for merchants to put on their website. This include the use of the free PayPal shopping cart. We recommend this product as a good place to start learning about using PayPal.
The when the visitor clicks on one of the button, they are directed to a PayPal hosted page where the visitor can either pay by credit card or by PayPal.
This services has an additional monthly fee. The credit card input by the visitor can be PayPal hosted or can be directly on the merchants website. Although if merchants is going to accept credit card input, he/she must be PCI compliant and take some of the liability and responsibility. This include purchasing an SSL certificate to maintain a secured connection when transmitting credit card information. That is also why Paypal requires business credit approval of the merchant prior to supplying the merchant with this service.
The implementation of Website Payment Pro requires API knowledge and a higher level of skill by the developer. Unless you are using a third-party shopping cart that has Website Payment Pro module integrated.
Website Payment Pro also provides a "virtual terminal" to the merchant where they can process credit cards over the phone or fax. Merchant will be able to take the credit card information over the phone and enter that into the "virtual terminal" web application that PayPal provides.
As of this writing, if a merchant implement Website Payment Pro, they must also allow PayPal Express Checkout button on their eShop.
Website Payment Pro is an "all-in-one" solution and includes a Internet Merchant Account.
Express Checkout is for those merchants that already have an Internet merchant account with their own bank but want to add PayPal. When visitors click on the PayPal Express Checkout button, the visitor is redirected to Paypal hosted page where credit card input is made. Paypal then redirects visitor back to merchant site for the final "pay" button. This implementation requires API programming knowledge.
PayFlow is a secured connection between merchant site and merchant account. It is designed for larger merchants that have a higher volume of transactions. Requires API programming for implementation and merchant is responsible for PCI complianance.
